Hi 👋
So I wanted to share how (and why) I ended up creating a Blowfish starter template.
Why Blowfish?#
First of all, I love the Blowfish Hugo theme.
I’ve used it for my personal website, profile pages, and blog projects. The customization is just 👌 and it’s honestly one of the cleanest Hugo themes I’ve worked with.
I’ve tried a few different ways of using it:
- Git submodules
- Manually downloading and uploading theme files
(I haven’t tried Hugo Modules or the Blowfish CLI tools yet.)
The problem is…#
Blowfish updates a lot—almost every month.
Every time a new version drops, updating becomes a bit of a chore.
So with the help from ChatGPT and GitHub Actions, I managed to automate it. Every week update-blowfish.yml file will check if there’s a new Blowfish release and if there’s any, it’ll automatically create a PR and all I have to do is merge it. Problem solved!
Then after completing that, I came across this discussion: 👉 Discussion #2843
My first thought was:
“Isn’t there already a template for this?”
There is one: 👉 Blowfish_template
But I hesitated to recommend it… because I hadn’t actually tried it myself.
So I gave it a shot first.
And honestly?
It didn’t feel like a true “starter template”.
- It needed a lot of setup before it worked
- There were unnecessary files
- It wasn’t exactly plug-and-play
So I decided not to recommend it in that discussion. It just didn’t match the idea of something that’s easy to deploy.
The idea was…#
That’s when I thought:
“What if I just make my own starter template?”
The goal was simple:
- Minimal setup
- Clean structure
- Works out of the box
- Deployable anywhere
I wanted something that could run on:
The twist is that…#
I didn’t even have my laptop.
I built the entire thing using just my phone.
With a lot of help from ChatGPT and GitHub Actions, I managed to put together a working template that:
- Builds automatically
- Deploys across multiple platforms
- Requires little to no setup
The result#
Here’s the repository:
👉 github.com/mksalada/blowfish-starter-template
Live demos#
- ☁️ Cloudflare Pages: blowfish-starter-template.pages.dev
- 🟢 Render: blowfish-starter-template.onrender.com
- ⚫️ Vercel: blowfish-starter-template.vercel.app
- 🐦 Netlify: blowfish-starter-template.netlify.app
- 😺 GitHub Pages: mksalada.github.io/blowfish-starter-template
Final thoughts#
This started as a simple idea:
“I just want something easier to deploy.”
It turned into a full starter template that works across multiple platforms—even built entirely from a phone.
If you’re getting started with Blowfish, or just want a smoother deployment experience, feel free to check it out and use it.