15th June 2024 - Hugo Links To Static Files
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I have finally got my website sorted for flux playlists. Yes, my 
gopher is a great place but for ease, I thought I could get a website 
going. It is https://stug.uk. 

I have a vps running FreeBSD which costs me Â10 a year. Throw in Â12 
for the domain for 2 years and we have a cheap box to muck around 
with. I am inherently lazy and did not want to muck around too much 
with site generation. So I decided to use Hugo to build a static site. 

One of the blockers I found with Hugo was that it does not like you 
linking to text files or PDFs. It seems to be a key failing. After 
some search fu, I found a particularly helpful chap, Justin Pearson. I 
am recording this in gopher so I don't lose it and hopefully it can 
help others. It worked a treat and over multiple builds. 

The other oddity I found was that Hugo builds only for https and so I 
was struggling to get links to work until I set up SSL via certbot. A 
pain in the arse!

Taken from 
https://user.it.uu.se/~justin/Hugo/post/linking_to_the_static_dir/

Hugo: Linking to the static directory
Dec 13, 2022
I don’t know why this is so difficult. Hugo provides a static 
directory where you can put stuff that is directly copied to your 
web directory. In theory you can have links [A link]("/file.pdf") 
and if you the file static/file.pdf in your Hugo project base 
directory then all is well.

If your homepage has its root at some other location than the 
root, say example.com/Hugo rather than just example.com, then this 
does not always work. I really don’t understand why.

After googling I found this solution that creates a special short 
code. You use [A link]({{< static "/file.pdf" >}}) blah

You need to create the file layouts/shortcodes/static.md with the 
following content:

{{- .Scratch.Set "path" (.Get 0) -}}
{{- if hasPrefix (.Scratch.Get "path") "/" -}}
  {{- .Scratch.Set "path" (slicestr (.Scratch.Get "path") 1) -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- .Scratch.Get "path" | absLangURL -}}

It turns out that this rather long winded approach has its advantages. 
If you put all your papers in static/papers/ then you can create a 
shortcode layouts/shortcodes/paper.md :

{{- .Scratch.Set "basedir" "papers/" -}}
{{- .Scratch.Set "path" (.Get 0) -}}
{{- if hasPrefix (.Scratch.Get "path") "/" -}}
  {{- .Scratch.Set "path" (slicestr (.Scratch.Get "path") 1) -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- .Scratch.Add "basedir" (.Scratch.Get "path") -}}
{{- .Scratch.Get "basedir" | absLangURL -}}
You can the create links to your papers as :

[This paper]({{< paper "2017_ICTAI.pdf" >}})
Assuming that 2017_ICTAI.pdf is in your papers directory.

Incidental, if you are having trouble showing unexpended short codes in 
code blocks, then this thread will help.

[Link goes to 
https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/how-is-the-hugo-doc-site-showing-
shortcodes-in-code-blocks/9074]