Getting Started With Hexo -- Creating Posts

In a previous post, I shared my migration from Jekyll to Hexo for my GitHub Pages blog. In this post, I’ll go over some of the common commands I use to create posts and test my blog locally.

✍️ Create a New Post or Draft

The commands in Hexo are quite human-readable. To create a new blog post or draft, use:

$ hexo new post "My Post"
$ hexo new draft "My Draft"

This will create a Markdown file in the source/_posts folder for posts, or in the source/_drafts folder for drafts. The keywords "post" and "draft" refer to the layout used for the file. You can customize these layouts in the scaffolds folder.

You can also create your own custom layout file inside the scaffolds folder and use it when creating a new post. For example:

$ hexo new mylayout "My Layout"

To move a draft to the posts folder, use the publish command instead of new. This will move the file from source/_drafts to source/_posts :

$ hexo publish post "My Draft"

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🖥️ Run the Blog Locally

To run your blog locally, you first need to generate the static files:

$ hexo generate

Or use the shorthand:

$ hexo g

Then, start the local development server:

$ hexo server

By default, this will start a server at http://localhost:4000. Open that link in your browser and you’ll see your website.

Although Hexo is supposed to watch for local changes and update automatically, there are cases where a simple browser refresh doesn’t reflect your changes — especially when you modify configuration files like _config.yml. In those cases, it’s best to regenerate the static files and restart the server.

Also, we can use the clean command to remove previously generated files, to keep local repository clean.

$ hexo clean

✅ Summary

Here’s a quick cheat sheet:

Action	Command
Create a new post	hexo new post "Post Title"
Create a new file using other layouts	hexo new <layout name> "Post Title"
Publish a draft to a post	hexo publish post "Draft Name"
Generate static files	hexo generate or hexo g
Run local server	hexo server
Clean old files	hexo clean