The basic setup of Hugo on your local computer is easy, and well documented:

  1. Go to the folder in which you want to create the Hugo site structure. In my case this was C:\Users\UserName\Documents\

  2. Run the command hugo new site yoursitename.

    Tip
    		 In a Windows environment, I recommend using Windows Terminal.

    The result will be a new site with the following folders and files:

    archetypes
content
data
layouts
resources
static
themes
.hugo_build.lock
config.toml

However, you can’t run the Hugo server until you apply a theme. I initially chose the Navigator theme but after a while swapped to using the Airspace theme. I liked the fact that the newer Airspace theme uses SCSS rather than plain CSS.

To install the Airspace theme, do the following:

  1. Go to https://github.com/themefisher/airspace-hugo and click Code › Download ZIP:

    GitHub Code > download ZIP

  2. Extract the contents of the downloaded ZIP file.

  3. Rename the resulting folder from airspace-hugo-master to airspace-hugo.

  4. Copy the folder into the themes folder in your new Hugo site.

  5. In the airspace-hugo folder, go to the exampleSite folder.

  6. Copy the contents of the exampleSite folder:

    assets
config
content
i18n
static
nelify.toml

  7. Go to the root folder of the Hugo site and paste the contents. This will replace the empty folders that were in the root folder.

  8. Go to the themes folder and delete the exampleSite folder.

  9. Return to the root folder and run the command hugo server. You should now see a URL at which the generated site is available:

    Web Server is available at http://localhost:1313/airspace/ (bind address 127.0.0.1)