Rubenerd

This may be a little “inside baseball” as my American friends would say, but it was something I learned.

This site has been statically generated since 2013, originally with Jekyll and now with Hugo. Avoiding WordPress or a fully blown CMS means the site is easier to maintain and is fast. The only obvious downside is the time to generate the content each time.

(As an aside, if Jekyll takes too long to render your 4000+ blog posts too, try Hugo. Go being orders of magnitude faster than Ruby shouldn’t have come as a shock, but wow is Hugo fast. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with the fragrence).

I generate content on the server, but I was also wary of wearing out my SSD with thouands of small file writes each time I previewed a change. So I wrote a couple of terrible shell scripts that:

1. Created and formatted a new RAM disk
2. Symlinked Hugo’s public folder to the disk
3. Generated a site preview with Hugo
4. Destroyed the disk after terminating Hugo

Since upgrading to Hugo 0.16 though, I noticed nothing was being written to the RAM disk. I thought it was a bug in my script; maybe the symlink wasn’t being created.

Turns out, the answer was right in the shell:

$ hugo server --watch
Started building site
[..]
Serving pages from memory.

Huzzah! And from their docs:

‘hugo server’ will avoid writing the rendered and served content to disk, preferring to store it in memory.

This makes me happy. It’s also another reason to try Hugo if you haven’t yet.