How to Install and Upgrade Hugo on Mac

Hongtao Hao / 2020-01-29

I am only talking about installing and upgrading Hugo on mac in this post. A very important guide is the Hugo’s official tutorial on installing Hugo . Homebrew is the easiest way. I did not use this method simply because my MacOS version is so old that I could not install and upgrade Hugo through Homebrew. If you are like me, you can read on.

I chose the second method, which is called “Tarball” in Hugo’s tutorial . However, the instructions in this tutorial are way more complicated than it should be. That’s why I am writing about it here.

In fact, there are only two steps:

  1. Go to the page of official Hugo release where you can find the latest version of Hugo. And then download the file of hugo_0.70.0_macOS-64bit.tar.gz 1.

  2. Open Terminal, and type open -a Finder /usr/local/bin2. This will open the folder of /usr/local/bin. Then drag the hugo file in hugo_0.70.0_macOS-64bit that you just downloaded and unzipped into the /bin folder. If you are upgrading, just replace the old one.

If you don’t have /usr/local/bin, you can first go to /usr/local and create the bin folder by yourself.

To make it clearer, this is where you should place the hugo file:

└── local
    └── bin
        └── hugo

  1. This is just for an example. Hugo version number is changing as it gets upgraded. ↩︎

  2. Many thanks to the answer by “Westside guy” on this post . ↩︎

Last modified on 2021-10-05