Once I had the site running locally, I wanted a quicker way to run the hugo build command from Visual Studio Code. After a bit of searching, I found the article Tasks in Visual Studio Code helpful. In short, I defined the build task like this:

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{
	"version": "2.0.0",
	"tasks": [
		{
			"label": "Build",
			"type": "shell",
			"command": "hugo --source ./src",
			"group": {
				"kind": "build",
				"isDefault": true
			}
		}
	]
}

This task executes the hugo command which generates your website to the public/ directory by default and makes it ready to be deployed to your web server. The --source argument ensures the correct folder is built. In addition, setting "kind": "build" and "isDefault": true ensures that this task is executed with the Ctrl+Shift+B keyboard shortcut.

Next, I added another task to run the site locally:

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{
	"version": "2.0.0",
	"tasks": [
		{
			"label": "Build",
			"type": "shell",
			"command": "hugo --source ./src",
			"group": {
				"kind": "build",
				"isDefault": true
			}
		},
		{
			"label": "Serve",
			"type": "shell",
			"command": "hugo server -D --source ./src",
			"group": {
				"kind": "build"
			},
			"isBackground": true,
			"problemMatcher": []
		}
	]
}

This task executes the hugo server command. The -D flag ensures that we can preview content in draft mode, and again, the --source argument ensures the correct folder is served. The Serve task does not have "isDefault": true because we do not want the two tasks to conflict when using the Ctrl+Shift+B keyboard shortcut.

So far I’m pretty pleased with my experience with the Hugo static site generator.