How I simplified Hugo blog post creation (with a little help from AI)

The problem with creating Hugo posts

I wrote this little script to simplify creating new posts in this blog. Well, actually Amazon Q Developer wrote it - I just asked nicely, checked for errors, and tweaked the result until it did exactly what I wanted.

I’m a completeHugo n00b, so the only way I know to create posts is by running:

hugo new posts/[file-name].md

Simple enough, right? Well, there are a few things that make this more cumbersome than it needs to be:

1. I like to organize my posts by date (e.g., posts/2024-10-29/), but I never seem to remember today’s date.
2. As far as I know, post filenames can’t have spaces, so I have to manually convert “My title” to my-title-with-dashes - sure, maybe camelCase works too, but that’s even more mental overhead.
3. I constantly forget to add the .md extension at the end.

The manual workflow

So my typical workflow looks like this:

1. Type hugo new posts/
2. Stop to look up today’s date
3. Continue with 2024-10-29/title-with-dashes
4. Hit enter
5. Realize I forgot the .md extension (again!)
6. Rename the file to posts/2024-10-29/title-with-dashes.md

Now, I should mention that Hugo is a great framework with a huge community, so there’s probably a better way to do this. But as a newbie, this is what I found in the docs, and these are the pain points I ran into.

The solution

Six steps just to create a new post? I’m a lazy developer, so I knew there had to be a better way. Here’s the shell script I now use from my project’s root folder:

> ./new "new title"
Executing: hugo new posts/2024-10-29/new-title.md
Content: "./content/posts/2024-10-29/new-title.md" created

And here’s how it works:

#!/bin/sh

# Check if a title was provided
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Usage: new \"[title]\""
    exit 1
fi

# Get the title from the command line argument
title="$1"

# Generate the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format
date=$(date +"%Y-%m-%d")

# Convert the title to lowercase and replace spaces with dashes
formatted_title=$(echo "$title" | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | tr ' ' '-')

# Create the Hugo command
hugo_command="hugo new posts/$date/$formatted_title.md"

echo "Executing: $hugo_command"

# Execute the Hugo command
$hugo_command

Behind the scenes: The AI assistant

Remember that part where I said Amazon Q Developer wrote this? Here’s how that actually went down. I literally just opened Q’s chat in my IDE and had this conversation:

Me:

Create a shell script that turns:

./new "[title]"

into:

hugo new posts/[date (format: YYYY-MM-DD)]/[title-with-dashes].md

Example: Today is October 29th, 2024. When I run ./new "my title", execute hugo new post/2024-10-29/my-title.md

Amazon Q Developer:

Certainly! I’ll create a shell script named new that accomplishes what you’ve described. Here’s the script:

/* Script omitted. It's almost the same as above ↑ */

To use this script:

1. Save it in a file named new (without any extension) in the root directory of your project.
2. Make the script executable by running:

   shell code snippet start

   chmod +x /path/to/new

   shell code snippet end

3. Now you can use the script as you described. For example:

   shell code snippet start

   new "My title"

   shell code snippet end

This script does the following:

1. It checks if a title was provided as an argument.
2. It gets the current date in the YYYY-MM-DD format.
3. It converts the provided title to lowercase and replaces spaces with dashes.
4. It constructs the Hugo command with the formatted date and title.
5. It executes the Hugo command to create the new post.

With this script, when you run new "My title" on October 29th, 2024, it will execute:

hugo new posts/2024-10-29/my-title.md

Remember to ensure that you save this script in the root folder of your project so that it creates new posts in the correct location.

And that was it! Kind of feels like cheating, right? But the script works exactly as I wanted it to, and I’d probably have written something similar myself - just with more trial and error, visits to Stack Overflow, and time spent looking up shell commands I don’t use often enough to remember.