Managing 3 Hugo Blogs from a Single Folder

I run 3 Hugo blogs for different purposes.

1. Dev blog — Development debugging logs, technical documentation (this blog)
2. [App] Homepage — App introduction + update blog, multilingual (ko/en)
3. Personal blog — Non-development writing

They are separated by role, but I wanted to manage them all from one place.

Directory Structure

~/domain/
├── seunghan-xyz/           # Dev blog
│   ├── content/
│   │   ├── posts/          # Technical posts
│   │   ├── projects/       # Project introductions
│   │   └── about/
│   ├── themes/
│   │   └── PaperMod/       # git submodule
│   ├── hugo.toml
│   └── public/             # Build output
│
├── blogs/
│   └── blog_richdada/
│       ├── [app]-blog/     # App homepage + blog
│       │   ├── content/
│       │   │   ├── posts/
│       │   │   ├── features/
│       │   │   ├── legal/
│       │   │   └── mcp/
│       │   ├── i18n/       # ko.yaml, en.yaml
│       │   ├── hugo.toml
│       │   └── netlify.toml
│       │
│       └── personal-blog/  # Personal blog
│           ├── content/
│           │   └── posts/
│           └── hugo.toml
│
└── dcode/
    └── landing/            # Static landing pages

Theme Selection

Dev Blog: PaperMod

# hugo.toml
theme = 'PaperMod'

Minimal and fast. Code highlighting is clean and dark mode is supported by default. Search, archive, and table of contents features are built in, requiring almost no additional configuration.

[markup.highlight]
style = "github-dark"
noClasses = false

App Blog: Hugo Stack v3

# hugo.toml
[module]
  [[module.imports]]
    path = "github.com/CaiJimmy/hugo-theme-stack/v3"

Card-style layout. Suits pages with many visual elements like app introduction pages. Installed via Hugo Modules for easy updates:

hugo mod get -u github.com/CaiJimmy/hugo-theme-stack/v3

Multilingual Setup (App Blog)

App store reviews require an app homepage URL, and an English page is often needed as well.

# hugo.toml
DefaultContentLanguage = "ko"

[languages]
  [languages.ko]
    languageName = "Korean"
    weight = 1
  [languages.en]
    languageName = "English"
    weight = 2

Content file structure:

content/
├── posts/
│   ├── ko/
│   │   └── feature-update.md
│   └── en/
│       └── feature-update.md
├── features/
│   └── _index.ko.md
│   └── _index.en.md

Pages without translations fall back to the default language (ko). It is more practical to translate only key pages rather than everything.

Netlify Deployment

Each blog has its own netlify.toml and a separate Netlify site.

# netlify.toml
[build]
  publish = "public"
  command = "hugo --minify"

[build.environment]
  HUGO_VERSION = "0.141.0"

[[headers]]
  for = "/*"
  [headers.values]
    X-Frame-Options = "DENY"
    X-Content-Type-Options = "nosniff"

Automatic deployment: Connect the GitHub repository to Netlify and it auto-builds on main branch pushes.

Manual deployment (dev blog):

cd ~/domain/seunghan-xyz
hugo && netlify deploy --prod \
  --dir ~/domain/seunghan-xyz/public \
  --site [SITE_ID]

Absolute path required for --dir. Using a relative path deploys based on the current working directory, uploading the wrong files.

Local Development

# Dev blog
cd ~/domain/seunghan-xyz
hugo server -D          # Preview including drafts
hugo server --port 1314 # Avoid port conflicts

# App blog
cd ~/domain/blogs/blog_richdada/[app]-blog
hugo server -D --port 1315

# Personal blog
cd ~/domain/blogs/blog_richdada/personal-blog
hugo server -D --port 1316

All three servers can run simultaneously. Just use different ports.

Post Writing Patterns

Front Matter Template

---
title: "Title"
date: 2025-10-08
draft: false
tags: ["tag1", "tag2"]
description: "One-line SEO description"
---

Write with draft: true and change to false when complete. This prevents drafts from being accidentally deployed.

Filename Convention

posts/flutter-testflight-makefile-automation.md
posts/rails-dart-api-integration.md
posts/hugo-blog-multi-site-management.md

All lowercase, hyphen-separated. The URL becomes the filename directly.

Theme Updates

PaperMod (git submodule)

cd ~/domain/seunghan-xyz
git submodule update --remote --merge
git add themes/PaperMod
git commit -m "chore: update PaperMod theme"

Stack v3 (Hugo Modules)

cd ~/domain/blogs/blog_richdada/[app]-blog
hugo mod get -u
hugo mod tidy

SEO Configuration

# hugo.toml
enableRobotsTXT = true

[outputs]
home = ["HTML", "RSS", "JSON"]

[params]
  description = "..."
  keywords = ["development", "Flutter", "iOS", "Rails"]

JSON output is needed for Fuse.js search. When you enable the search feature in PaperMod, it is used automatically.

Summary

All three blogs build and deploy independently of each other. I was tempted to share common configurations, but since each has different Hugo versions and requirements, the conclusion was to keep them independent.