Meta: Usage and workflow, multisite and keeping sites up to date.

[adrinux]

As originally conceived web-starter-hugo was intended as a base for a yeoman generator. Thus the workflow would have been to create a new instance of web-starter-hugo for each project.

Whilst this workflow is ok when the generated projects are passed onto a third party and never seen again its less desirable for long term maintenance and updating of projects. It forces repetitive updating of multiple sites and can allow drift to occur between local project specific npm modules and globally installed ones.

Ideally one instance of web-starter-hugo could contain multiple sites so that updating normalize.css or autoprefixer via npm would result in regenerated css for all sites.

Issues:

• Currently w-s-h is using hugo's global layout folder for per site styling. It should probably be copying processed files into a per project hugo theme instead.
• Assets would need to end up in the correct per project location
• how to route tasks per project?
• how to perform tasks on all projects?

Solutions:

• replace 'hugo' folder with a per project 'sitename' folder?

[adrinux]

Hugo already has support for multiple sites run from one install, this comment details several: https://discuss.gohugo.io/t/hugo-multisite-workflow/103/8

'Super static site starter' takes a multisite approach (but now doesn't use Gulp) https://github.com/dkebler/4S/tree/working-020

[adrinux]

How do the new postcss and js processing pipes in Hugo fit with multisite? If the node modules have to be installed per theme, that's a lot of duplication...

Edit: May be possible to symlink node_modules

[adrinux]

Relevant hugo config/cli file options:

contentDir
-d or --destination <- wsh uses this for dev/stage/live env
assetDir <- assets to be processed by hugo pipes
themesDir <- can have a single top-level themes dir, but would we still need 
                     node_modules per theme for pipes?  Might be able to symlink
                     a top level node_modules into required theme folders
--config = path to config file
--source = filesystem path to read files relative from