Hugo On Windows 11

I’m in a split world between my trusty Intel Mac Laptop and a Windows 11 desktop. I’ve been away from Windows for a long time, so I’m making a few notes for anyone who needs to solve similar issues. Bottom line was that I wanted to add some content to my blog where the static content is created using Hugo

I switched from Bear to Obsidian earlier this year for my general note taking. Obsidian lets you synchronise vaults (document repositories) via iCloud. So my blog authoring process has been to mount the Hugo directory as a vault via iCloud in Obsidian. When I then create new content using the Hugo command line :

hugo create content/posts/2025/my-new-post.md

This creates the markdown file and makes it available in Obsidian.

So for authoring its trivial to use the iCloud service to mount the drive and Obsidian for windows to edit it.

Installing the windows version of Hugo doesn’t provide the “deploy” options i.e. the pre built binaries are the extended edition not the extended/deploy edition. As I’m a Unix person at heart still, I found it quicker to install Ubuntu using win 11 WSL. Then adding go and gcc allow me to install the deploy version from Github using :

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended,withdeploy github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Add ~/go/bin to your path and AWS credentials to ~/.aws/credentials

The windows C drive is mounted by default in Ubuntu WSL under /mnt/c

So for me I simply run

hugo
export AWS_PROFILE="hugo" && hugo deploy

in my Hugo working directory /mnt/c/iCloudDrive/Documents/goulsblog

This will build the static content, push that static content to my S3 bucket and invalidate the cloudfront cache.