Hugo on Mad Blog

Setting Up a Hugo Blog on Netlify (The Easy Way)

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In my last post I walked through hosting a Hugo blog on AWS S3 with CloudFront. It works, but let’s be honest — it’s a lot of moving parts. S3 bucket, CloudFront distribution, IAM policies, DNS records, cache invalidation. If your blog is the only thing on the line, that’s a fair bit of overhead.

A few people asked whether there’s a simpler way. There is.

This post covers hosting the same Hugo blog on Netlify — the zero-config, free HTTPS, push-to-deploy alternative.

Setting Up a Hugo Blog on AWS S3 with Custom Domain

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This guide walks through setting up a Hugo blog on AWS S3 with a custom domain — perfect for your personal blog or portfolio.

Overview

Here’s the pipeline we’ll set up:

Markdown → Hugo Build → S3 Static Host → CloudFront CDN → blog.example.com

Hugo generates static HTML from markdown
S3 hosts the files as a static website
CloudFront provides caching, HTTPS, and better performance
Ionos DNS routes your subdomain to CloudFront

Prerequisites

Hugo installed
AWS account with access to S3 and CloudFront
Domain/subdomain in Ionos (e.g., blog.example.com)

Step 1: Build Your Hugo Site

cd /workspace/hugo-blog
hugo --minify

This generates a public/ directory with all static files.

My First Post

madking.direct@gmail.com (Mad King) — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is my first blog post, written in Markdown and generated with Hugo.

Why Hugo?

Hugo is a fast, flexible static site generator. It lets me write in plain Markdown and produces static HTML that can be hosted anywhere — including AWS S3.

How It Works

Write content in Markdown (content/en/posts/*.md)
Run hugo --minify to build
Deploy to Netlify
Done!

Example Code

Here is a Python snippet:

def hello():
 print("Hello from my Hugo blog!")
 for i in range(10):
 print(f" Post {i + 1} live")

And a Bash example: