The Authoring Workflow in Hexo

In hexo, there’s a really nice workflow for creating a new post. There are docs on this, but who needs docs when we’ve got bloggers, right?

First, in the main project, make sure the /scaffolds/draft.md is the way you like it. Here’s mine…

---
title: {{ title }}
categories: []
tags: []
---

Notice how the date is excluded. If you’re writing a draft post, you don’t know when you’ll publish it yet, so you likely want to leave that off. It gets populated automatically a little later. Read on.

Then make sure your /scaffolds/post.md is the way you like it. Here’s mine…

---
title: {{ title }}
categories: []
tags: []
date: {{ date }}
---

It looks just the same, but there’s a date there.

Now here’s what my workflow looks like every time I create a new blog post.

1. At the command line type hexo new draft foo
2. Switch to Visual Studio Code (or your markdown editor of choice)
3. Edit the foo.md file that should be in your /source/_drafts folder
4. Back at the command line type hexo publish foo

When you created the initial draft, it created in the _drafts folder which doesn’t get generated, so it’s not going to make it to your website yet.

When you published it, hexo moved the markdown file from _drafts over to _posts and added the current date and time.

I think that’s a slick workflow and I’m very happy with it.