Fearless Hugo Updates With HVM

Two things happened on the same day that I posted “Fearless Website Updates With Hugo” :

• I discovered grouse - a tool for diffing the generated Hugo sites, very similar to my script from the previous post. You may prefer to adopt grouse instead.
• In the comments, u/McShelby recommended me hvm as a way to automate Hugo upgrades in my script.

grouse doesn’t support diffing staged changes and doesn’t offer me any obvious benefits over a shell script. But hvm sparked my interest.

I tried it, and indeed, it works like a charm. After installing and configuring hvm, now updating Hugo and reviewing the impact is as simple as hvm use latest && git add .hvm && ./review_staged_changes.sh. This works with no changes to my script¹ because .hvm is just a regular file in the repo, tracked by Git. So, the selected Hugo version can be rolled back with git stash just like any other change. Cool! Another problem solved.