minimis

Minimalistic theme for personal sites built with Hugo. The goal of minimis is to be:

• Small, so that the codebase is very easy to understand and easily understandable
• Focused to avoid feature bloat. The goal is to build a theme for a personal page and software engineering blog.
• Simple: no complicated and large CSS frameworks, JavaScript libraries and heavy dependencies.

This theme is heavily inspired by bearblog and hugo-bearblog, but is focused on features that I was missing and wanted to change/adjust to my liking. bearblog is a prime example of something that looks very good with minimal CSS configuration, so realized I don't need a complicated CSS framework to make a good looking site.

I am not a professional web developer, so I am sure there are many things that could be improved. If you have any suggestions, please open an issue or a pull request: I am happy to accept contributions.

Features

The theme is still in development, but the following features are already implemented:

• Tags and filtering
• Custom links in the main menu
• Google Analytics, Twitter cards support
• RSS support
• Favicons
• Math rendering with KaTeX
• Diagram rendering with Mermaid.js
• Mastodon verification
• Adding HTML to Markdown pages

If you want to use this theme and are missing something, feel free to create a GitHub Issue.

Live demo

exampleSite

The example site is a good place to start. It showcases the features of the theme and is a good starting point for your own site. The source code for the example site is available under exampleSite and it is uploaded to kirillbobyrev.github.io/minimis on every commit to main branch through GitHub Actions workflow: build-and-deploy.yml.

Whenever you make a change to the theme, you can test it by running

hugo server --source exampleSite --watch

if you are in the root directory of the repository or just

hugo server --watch

If you are in the exampleSite directory.

My personal site

Minimis powers my personal site and blog at kirillbobyrev.com. I use it to write about software and hobbies. The source code for the site is available at github.com/kirillbobyrev/kirillbobyrev.com. It doesn't differ much from the example site, but it has some customizations such as resume page, favicons and custom domain usage. It is a good example of a real-world usage of minimis.

Using the theme

Hugo documentation is very extensive and I can't recommend it enough to understand the whole system and how to use external themes.

Here is a quick start guide if you are already familiar with Hugo and want to start using minimis:

Create a new site

hugo new site $YOUR_SITE_NAME

Add the theme

The easiest way to use the theme is through Hugo modules:

Add the following to your hugo.toml/config.toml:

theme = 'github.com/kirillbobyrev/minimis'

And then run

# Initialize hugo module for your site.
hugo mod init github.com/$YOUR_GITHUB_ACCOUNT/$REPO
# Fetch the theme.
hugo mod get -u

Alternatively, you can use the theme as a git submodule and put it under themes/minimis. Check out Hugo docs for more information.

Configure the theme and your website

The theme is configured through params in hugo.toml/config.toml. Check out exampleSite/hugo.toml for an example configuration of the demo site. For a full list of available options, check out params in hugo.toml.

Deployment

For deployment, I recommend using GitHub Pages. You can check out Hugo docs on how to set it up, but I think the provided GitHub Actions workflow is unnecessarily complicated. Here is the workflow that powers deployment of minimis demo: build-and-deploy.yml