1 Start with a working site

A good tutorial begins with a result the reader can see. For OINK, that result is the official Starter served locally by Hugo Extended—before any logo, palette, language set, or content architecture is changed.

Define the outcome

At the end of this chapter you should have English, Chinese, and French home pages; working Docs, Blog, and Book routes; local search; and a color-mode control. That small baseline is enough to distinguish a content mistake from a theme or deployment problem later.

Install the prerequisite

Use Git, Go 1.27 or newer, and Hugo Extended 0.168.0 for this tutorial. Development, CI, and release tests use this single Hugo baseline, which advances with stable releases. Update an older Starter’s Hugo workflow pins before validation. Older Hugo compatibility is no longer maintained. The development theme also needs standalone Dart Sass 1.105.2 on PATH. Node.js is not required.

$ go version
go version go1.27.2 darwin/arm64
$ hugo version
hugo v0.168.0+extended+withdeploy darwin/arm64

Run the preview

Create a repository with GitHub’s Use this template action when it will become a real project. To evaluate the original locally, clone it and start Hugo:

$ git clone https://github.com/pgsty/oink-starter.git my-docs
$ cd my-docs
$ hugo server

Open the address Hugo prints. Change one sentence in data/home/en.yaml and confirm that the browser shows it. A preview that responds to a content edit is more useful evidence than a terminal that only says the server started.

Record the baseline

Before customizing anything, record four facts: the Hugo version, the theme version in go.mod, the commit under review, and the routes you opened. Chapter 2 turns that running site into a content tree without losing this baseline.

For the complete layered workflow, see Use OINK Starter. For installation without the template, see From scratch.