Software documentation website - is hugo right for me?

support
1

Hai!

So I’m a c++/Python developer so this is a little new to me & I’m unsure if this is the right tool for the job… So here is the job:
I need a page that can list multiple software (like cat1, cat2, cat3 cat4) & each category would display a documentation per each version of the software (like v1,v2,v3,v4).

Essentially a doc repository.
As it stands I have a website & domain & ftp server where I upload my website…
I was thinking of using hugo to generate website from git repository & hopefully generate a website per commit so I can version the app in git and have versioned documentation on website for each ver…
Does this make sense?
In any case… can Hugo… compile a website into a file, that then I can upload to FTP & I can point link to html.index file?
Or do I need to somehow run Hugo on the host server/etc…

As far as I can tell, I would need a “2 layer” approach, 1 would be to generate a home hugo project and 2nd that would download all repositories& commits I want in to specific folders so that hugo can gen option per each version.

Think Qt documentation Qt Documentation Archives
Where you can pick any version you want to see docs for…

Regards
Dariusz

2

People are already using Hugo for software documentation with a Git workflow.

There are several Open Source Hugo themes for Documentation that you can have a look at:
https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/docs/

Hugo compiles static HTML files along with their assets under a publishDir (by default called /public/) and you can deploy in a number of ways.

Also may I suggest that you have a look at the Rsync workflow as it is much faster than uploading through FTP.

3

That’s fantastic thanks!
I’ll dig into docs.

The GIT projects that you mentioned… do you know if they document each commit or just one final one?

TIA

4

Not really aware of the workflow as I do not contribute to documentation.

You can have a look at the GitHub repo of Camunda that is the source of https://docs.camunda.org/

5

Hi Dariusz,

There are lots of software projects that use Hugo for their documentation, for example, Kubernetes and Istio just to name the big ones from the cloud native world.

If you want to puzzle the site together from different git repos, then definitely take a look at using Hugo modules.

With your setup I think the most difficult part will be to find out how to organize your content to get the docs for the different software versions right.