Working with Hugo v43 and TravisCI

06 September 2018

Since Hugo v43, you can use a brand new assets pipeline called Hugo Pipes that allows using SASS/SCSS files without relying on another build tool such as Gulp or Grunt.

However, updating Hugo and your code to use Pipes will not work out of the box.

This post is a follow up of my “Publishing a website built with Hugo to GitHub Pages” post.

Pipes require the extended version of Hugo

Hugo is now released with two binary version: One with and one without SCSS/SASS support. At the time of writing, this is only available in the binaries on the GitHub release page. Brew, Snap builds etc. will come. But note that you only need the extended version if you want to edit SCSS. For your CI server, or if you don’t use SCSS, you will most likely want the non-extended version.

This means this change also need to be applied to the .travis.yml configuration file.

If you use a Mac, Homebrew will install the extended version of Hugo.

Pipes expect node and some npm libraries to be installed

Some of the assets pipeline logic relies on a couple of node packages, and even if you don’t use them, Hugo won’t build unless they are installed.

First I initialized the package.json file with npm init.

Them, as I tend to never install an npm package globally, I just installed the dependencies locally for this project running npm i postcss-cli autoprefixer.

This step generates a couple of files, don’t forget to add them to the .gitignore.

Processing steps require a bit of configuration

To use PostCSS and autoprefixer, some configuration files must be created. The ones at the root of this project have the bare minimum configuration and should be enough for most of my needs later.

Caveats

Files location

I used to have my css file in the static directory of my theme, but to be used as a resource, the file has to be in the assets folder of the theme.

Missing libraries

While everything worked perfectly fine locally, I had trouble running the extended version of Hugo on Travis environment. The script step shown GLIBCXX_3.4.20' not found errors, and checking what GLIBCXX were in the shared objects, I got the following:

$ strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 | grep GLIBCXX
GLIBCXX_3.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.1
GLIBCXX_3.4.2
GLIBCXX_3.4.3
GLIBCXX_3.4.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.5
GLIBCXX_3.4.6
GLIBCXX_3.4.7
GLIBCXX_3.4.8
GLIBCXX_3.4.9
GLIBCXX_3.4.10
GLIBCXX_3.4.11
GLIBCXX_3.4.12
GLIBCXX_3.4.13
GLIBCXX_3.4.14
GLIBCXX_3.4.15
GLIBCXX_3.4.16
GLIBCXX_3.4.17
GLIBCXX_3.4.18
GLIBCXX_3.4.19
GLIBCXX_DEBUG_MESSAGE_LENGTH

Installing libstdc++-4.9-dev did better:

$ strings /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 | grep GLIBCXX
GLIBCXX_3.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.1
GLIBCXX_3.4.2
GLIBCXX_3.4.3
GLIBCXX_3.4.4
GLIBCXX_3.4.5
GLIBCXX_3.4.6
GLIBCXX_3.4.7
GLIBCXX_3.4.8
GLIBCXX_3.4.9
GLIBCXX_3.4.10
GLIBCXX_3.4.11
GLIBCXX_3.4.12
GLIBCXX_3.4.13
GLIBCXX_3.4.14
GLIBCXX_3.4.15
GLIBCXX_3.4.16
GLIBCXX_3.4.17
GLIBCXX_3.4.18
GLIBCXX_3.4.19
GLIBCXX_3.4.20
GLIBCXX_3.4.21
GLIBCXX_3.4.22
GLIBCXX_3.4.23
GLIBCXX_3.4.24
GLIBCXX_3.4.25
GLIBCXX_DEBUG_MESSAGE_LENGTH

But I was not quite done yet, and the build returned a horrid error:

relocation error: hugo: symbol _ZTVNSt7__cxx1119basic_istringstreamIcSt11char_traitsIcESaIcEEE, version GLIBCXX_3.4.21 not defined in file libstdc++.so.6 with link time reference

At this point I was kind of lost and posted a message to seek support on the Hugo discussion forum (see the thread).

Eventually, someone proposed a good workaround to apply in travis configuration:

before_install:
  # This workaround is required to avoid libstdc++ errors while
  # running "extended" hugo with SASS support.
  - wget -q -O libstdc++6
    http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/g/gcc-5/libstdc++6_5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.10_amd64.deb
  - sudo dpkg --force-all -i libstdc++6
install:
  - wget -q -O hugo.deb
    https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.47.1/hugo_extended_0.47.1_Linux-64bit.deb
  - sudo dpkg -i hugo.deb