Minimalist Hugo Template for Academic Websites

This repository contains a Hugo template to create a personal academic website. The template uses the PaperMod theme but modifies it in various ways to be more minimalist and more adapted to academic websites. The website is hosted on GitHub Pages.

Documentation

The template is documented at https://pascalmichaillat.org/b/.

Illustration

The website produced by the template can be viewed at https://pascalmichaillat.org/hugo-website/.

Installation

On your local machine

• Clone the repository to your local machine
• Install Hugo. On a Mac, this is easily done with Homebrew: simply run brew install hugo in the terminal.
• Since the website is hosted on GitHub Pages, it is convenient to install GitHub Desktop. The website can conveniently be updated from your local machine via GitHub Desktop without going to GitHub.
• Update the baseURL parameter in config.yml with the website URL that you plan to use. By default the URL is https://username.github.io.

On your GitHub account

• The first time that you push your repository to GitHub, you need to allow GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages so the website can be built and deployed to GitHub Pages.
• The first step is to ask GitHub to publish the website with a GitHub Action. GitHub offers a ready-made action to publish a Hugo website, called Deploy Hugo site to Pages. This action must be enabled in the Pages Settings of your GitHub repository. You can view the workflow triggered by the action in the .github/workflows/hugo.yml file.
• Once the GitHub Actions are enabled, GitHub will build and publish the website as soon as the repository is updated.
• If you would like to update the deployment action (for instance because it became outdated and fails to deploy the site), you can find the most recent action on GitHub. You can place this file directly in the .github/workflows folder to replace the old hugo.yml file—but make sure to set push: branches to ["main"].

Usage

Local development

Navigate to the website directory (cd) and run in the terminal:

hugo server

The command builds the website on your machine and makes it available at http://localhost:1313, rebuilding automatically as you edit. You can modify the content of the repository and develop your website entirely on your machine.

Deployment via Continuous Integration

Once your website is ready to be made public, commit your content and template changes and push them to the website repository on GitHub (to the default branch, main). It is convenient to use GitHub Desktop for this Git operation.

On each push, the GitHub Actions workflow invokes Hugo to generate the website and deploys the output to GitHub Pages. During the workflow, Hugo processes your content, templates, and other project files and generates a static website.

Performance

Despite the modifications to the PaperMod theme, the website continues to perform well on mobile and desktop devices. Here is an overview of the mobile performance from PageSpeed Insights:

And here is an overview of the desktop performance:

Build and test environments

Deployment via Continuous Integration

• Platform: GitHub Actions on ubuntu-latest
• Hugo version: v0.128.0

Local development and testing

• Operating system: macOS Sequoia 15.4.1
• Hugo version: v0.135.0

Browser testing

• Safari 18.4 on macOS 15.4.1
• Mobile Safari on iOS 18.4.1

Reporting issues

These configurations have been validated; other Hugo versions, operating systems, and web browsers may require minor adjustments. Please report any issues to help improve compatibility.

License

This repository is licensed under the MIT License.

Related resources

• latex-cv - This LaTeX template produces a minimalist academic CV, which you can post on your website. Your CV should be named cv.pdf and placed in the static folder. It will be accessible from the homepage via a social icon.

Real-world implementations

• Pascal Michaillat's website (source code)
• Dylan Balla-Elliott's website (source code)
• Rosa van den Ende's website (source code)
• Samia Kabir's website (source code)
• Dylan Laplace Mermoud's website (source code)
• Maarten Goos's website (source code)
• Aryan Ahadinia's website (source code)
• Jun Wong's website (source code)
• Erling Rennemo Jellum's website (source code)
• Yangkeun Yun's website (source code)
• Maghfira Ramadhani's website (source code)
• Ismael Moreno-Martinez's website (source code)
• Lucas Warwar's website (source code)
• Franz Louis Cesista's website (source code)
• Gabe Sekeres's website (source code)
• Kevin Roice's website (source code)
• Daniel Barbosa's website (source code)
• Wei Zhang's website (source code)
• Ben Hermann's website (source code)
• Franco Corona's website (source code)
• Tom George's website (source code)
• Yucheng Zhou's website (source code)
• Arthur Douillard's website
• Benjamin Hattemer's website
• Kostas Bimpikis's website
• Pragathi Praveena's website
• Qiwei He's website
• Pierre Bardier's website
• Marek Wiewiórka's website
• Eran Shmuëli's website