I thought the beginning of this post’s title might catch your eye as it doesn’t sound like what usually appears on my blog! 🤣 But actually it’s a troubleshooting log with Hugo, Indiekit, and being a total noob with Node.js. How Hugo Handles Dates A few weeks ago, I noticed some of my Hugo sort functions weren’t working. For example, I want Hugo to sort the most recent pages based on the date or lastmod front matter parameter (param). Not sure when it broke, or if it was always broke; but it would not sort the date correctly when a page did not contain a lastmod param, i.e., pages with only a date param, despite being newer, would not go to the top of the list. After fiddling with Hugo’s [frontmatter] date config using fallbacks like GitInfo or FileMod times, that actually made things worse. I prefer having an explicit lastmod param set myself. The configuration I settled on is: 1[frontmatter] 2 date = ["date", ":default"] 3 lastmod = ["lastmod"] But while troubleshooting all this, I realized all date values, be it lastmod or date, were within quote marks—making them “strings” instead of actual date values (if I understand that correctly). Maybe that is why it wasn’t processing correctly as it can’t be parsed as a string? This was probably why my Hugo conditionals were failing, but I can’t be certain. Remove Quote Marks Fixing existing date params with VSCodium’s search and replace was very simple with my favourite—Regex! All date type params had quote marks removed by using this search pattern: date = "([^']+)" and replaced with date = $1. Making sweeping changes like this though is always a little nerve wracking for me. Luckily Git has some features that help which I’ve learnt over the last few years; like stashing current changes so it doesn’t interfere with the “find and replace” operation, and making the operation a single commit means I can always revert in case of any problems. Here’s the working Hugo conditional I now use to generate a list of all my slash pages, in reverse chronological order (last edited one at the top): 1{{ $sortedPages := .Pages.ByLastmod.Reverse }} 2{{ range (.Paginate $sortedPages).Pages }} 3 {{ partial "entry.html" . }} 4{{ end }} Indiekit Managed Content But what about the Markdown files created by Indiekit? My notes, photos, likes (and recently added: replies, RSVPs, books) are managed separately with Indiekit, the micropub server + client; i.e., the Markdown files are not created by me using the hugo new command within my IDE. Dates in the front matter of Indiekit-managed posts are wrapped in quote marks and that bugged me—I wanted all date params to be consistent, with no quotes. I bravely went to have a look at the code that controls this behaviour: Indiekit’s publication preset for Hugo. Node Noob Fixing this was a way more difficult as it was Node.js territory. Despite my web dev and techy explorations recently with Quartz—where I was exposed to more Node.js, npm, npx, JS, TS, and React components—I am still a total noob in this area. Indiekit was the first Node app I configured and used, and now Quartz. To be honest, now that I’m using two Node apps rather extensively, I should probably invest a day or two trying to understand how Node.js actually work so I can customize and use them more proficiently. But with documentation, and by trial and error, I’m slowly picking up on how the files relate to each other in Node packages, on a very basic level; but I digress. Creating My First Indiekit Custom Plugin for Hugo I forked the official preset-hugo npm package and made custom changes to the post-template.js so it would capture the dates as objects first before it stringifies the value. Full disclosure: trying to work out how to edit the plugin from existing code patterns and references from other Node projects that dealt with date objects didn’t cut it; so I got some help from an LLM chatbot; namely Qwen Coder locally via Ollama and Claude Haiku from Duck.ai. (I’ve written a spin-off about using LLMs this way while writing this post. I’ll link to it when it is published.) Here’s the repo to my custom plugin if you’re interested: I referred to Ricardo’s Indiekit custom plugins (he has a lot) to set up mine. By the way, his site is super neat, full of IndieWeb awesomeness; check it out! Installing the Custom Plugin When I thought the hard part was over, installing the plugin was actually more fiddly! My Indiekit server runs as a Docker container on my Pi. It took me a few tries before I got the server to see the custom plugin. Not sure which action caused it to work (unfortunately, I tried multiple things in one go); or if these are even valid actions, but here were some actions I took: Remove the package.lock and node_modules, then run npm install to fetch fresh updates. Bump the version number in package.json to trigger a new fetch. Make sure the minimum Node version requirement matches for the plugin and the main Indiekit app. Run docker compose build --no-cache to build a fresh container with new packages instead of stale ones, then docker compose down && docker compose up -d I was testing the plugin in local mode at the beginning and realized I had to switch to a remote Git repo for the Pi to access the new plugin. Unfortunately, I think npm only supports github:username/repo-name syntax for installs; so I resorted to using GitHub to host my node packages. I would have preferred if I could use Codeberg or SourceHut. Originally, I used NPM’s override feature to install my custom fork of preset-hugo in the Indiekit config, but I think running npm ci broke that override, and it just kept using the original @indiekit/preset-hugo plugin instead of the custom one. I ended up uninstalling the official plugin and installed mine, @eclecticpassions/preset-hugo and updated indiekit.config.js. npm Registry I have visited the npm site before, but never really understood how it works. The documentation is thorough and understandable—so I decided to create an account there! Hope to add a few more packages there in the near future as I learn to make plugins for Quartz and Indiekit. Conclusion Luckily, it worked in the end, but it was midnight by then so I went to bed. The following day, I tidied up the repos, wrote some notes for this post, and feeling quite content that the problem is solved. Happy I gained new Node.js experience from this troubleshooting session. 👩🏻‍💻 Thanks for reading! If you are a Node person and see some glaring mistake, I’d appreciate it a lot if you let me know so I can make corrections. Cheers! Resources Creating a package.json file An introduction to the npm package manager Creating and Publishing npm Packages Publishing Node.js packages Indiekit API Addendum I actually created a new Hugo shortcode while writing this post! The automatically fetched Open Image of the GitHub repo is a new feature on this site. Here’s a sneak peek at the workflow (and an excuse to make a new D2 diagram). I’ll link to the post about it when it’s done. [For up-to-date content, visit BurgeonLab directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For topic-specific feeds, visit /subscribe. Thanks for reading my blog using a RSS reader!]