To skip the back story click [HERE].

Why I had this problem

I originally moved this blog to Hugo because I was sick of needing to constantly update Ghost and those updates breaking my workflow, or worse, my entire blog.

For me, the primary selling point of a static site generator is that it won’t have these breaking changes. For years, I can hand it Markdown and it will spit out HTML.

Well, not exactly. Working on another project recently, I updated all my Homebrew packages to make sure I had the latest versions of a few things. It did not occur to me that this would include Hugo. After creating my post, I ran hugo serve to preview it and got an error.

❯ hugo serve
Watching for changes in /Users/sam/blog.seemsgood.com/{archetypes,content,data,i18n,layouts,static,themes}
Watching for config changes in /Users/sam/blog.seemsgood.com/hugo.toml, /Users/sam/blog.seemsgood.com/themes/ananke/config.yaml
Start building sites … 
hugo v0.142.0+extended+withdeploy darwin/arm64 BuildDate=2025-01-22T12:20:52Z VendorInfo=brew

ERROR deprecated: resources.ToCSS was deprecated in Hugo v0.128.0 and will be removed in Hugo 0.143.0. Use css.Sass instead.
ERROR deprecated: .Site.Social was deprecated in Hugo v0.124.0 and will be removed in Hugo 0.143.0. Implement taxonomy 'social' or use .Site.Params.Social instead.
Built in 1726 ms
Error: error building site: logged 2 error(s)

Both of these are errors with my theme.

As I see it, I have three options to fix this issue.

1. Fix my theme
2. Change themes
3. Revert to a version of Hugo that works with my theme

Fix my theme

My memory is that this theme hasn’t been updated in quite a while¹. If that’s the case, I’ll need to update the code myself. That’s a rabbit hole I’m not willing to go down.

Change themes

I’m specifically trying to avoid breaking anything so totally changing themes seems like a step in the wrong direction.

Revert Hugo

This seems like the easiest way forward. Hugo is open source and I installed it with Homebrew, so I’d imagine there’s got to be a relatively straightforward way to get an older version of Hugo working on my system.

Installing an old version

tl;dr

1. Find the Homebrew formula in the Homebrew repository
2. Go through commit history to find an old version that will work for you
3. Download that .rb
4. brew install /path/to/some_formula.rb

Full steps

Homebrew does have a built-in way to install old versions (brew install some_package@some_version) but not all packages are built to support this installation method. Unfortunatelly, Hugo is one of these.

This method comes from this Stack Overflow answer:

Before doing anything, I’ll need to uninstall the current version with brew remove hugo .

Next, find where this Homebrew formula exists in the Homebrew GitHub repo. For Hugo, that’s https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/h/hugo.rb .

We want an old version of this file so click History at the top of that page to get to a list of commits on this file.

My error message indicates that I’m going to want a version before 0.124.0 . I’ll have to go back a few pages before I find the commit for 0.123.8 . Click View code at this point (the middle of the three icons on the right side) to get to the old version of that file

Click the download icon to download this old Homebrew forumla.

Install this old version with brew install /path/to/some_formula.rb

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, write this blog post so that when you break something again, you don’t have to spend a bunch of time researching a solution

tl;dr

1. Find the Homebrew formula in the Homebrew repository
2. Go through commit history to find an old version that will work for you
3. Download that .rb
4. brew install /path/to/some_formula.rb

Where I go from here

I see that this theme has started active development again. I thought I’d set things up in such a way that I’d be getting those updates but apparently not. I suppose I should look into that.

I’ve also been wanting a new theme for some additional features so it’s possible I don’t even troubleshoot this problem any further and simply migrate.

I hope this was helpful - thanks for reading!

Beer image by Len Rizzi (photographer), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rewind symbol by Emoji One, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

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