Building a Blowfish Starter Template

Hi 👋

So I wanted to share how (and why) I ended up creating a Blowfish starter template.

Why Blowfish?

First of all, I love the Blowfish Hugo theme.

I’ve used it for my personal website, profile pages, and blog projects. The customization is just 👌 and it’s honestly one of the cleanest Hugo themes I’ve worked with.

I’ve tried a few different ways of using it:

• Git submodules
• Manually downloading and uploading theme files

(I haven’t tried Hugo Modules or the Blowfish CLI tools yet.)

The problem is...

Blowfish updates a lot—almost every month.

Every time a new version drops, updating becomes a bit of a chore.

So with the help from ChatGPT and GitHub Actions, I managed to automate it. Every week update-blowfish.yml file will check if there's a new Blowfish release and if there's any, it'll automatically create a PR and all I have to do is merge it. Problem solved!

Then after completing that, I came across this discussion: 👉 Discussion #2843

My first thought was:

“Isn’t there already a template for this?”

There is one: 👉 Blowfish_template

But I hesitated to recommend it… because I hadn’t actually tried it myself.

So I gave it a shot first.

And honestly?

It didn’t feel like a true “starter template”.

• It needed a lot of setup before it worked
• There were unnecessary files
• It wasn’t exactly plug-and-play

So I decided not to recommend it in that discussion. It just didn’t match the idea of something that’s easy to deploy.

The idea was...

That’s when I thought:

“What if I just make my own starter template?”

The goal was simple:

• Minimal setup
• Clean structure
• Works out of the box
• Deployable anywhere

I wanted something that could run on:

• GitHub Pages
• Netlify
• Render
• Cloudflare Pages
• Vercel

The twist is that...

I didn’t even have my laptop.

I built the entire thing using just my phone.

With a lot of help from ChatGPT and GitHub Actions, I managed to put together a working template that:

• Builds automatically
• Deploys across multiple platforms
• Requires little to no setup

The result

Here’s the repository:

👉 github.com/mksalada/blowfish-starter-template

Live demos

• ☁️ Cloudflare Pages: blowfish-starter-template.pages.dev
• 🟢 Render: blowfish-starter-template.onrender.com
• ⚫️ Vercel: blowfish-starter-template.vercel.app
• 🐦 Netlify: blowfish-starter-template.netlify.app
• 😺 GitHub Pages: mksalada.github.io/blowfish-starter-template

Final thoughts

This started as a simple idea:

“I just want something easier to deploy.”

It turned into a full starter template that works across multiple platforms—even built entirely from a phone.

If you’re getting started with Blowfish, or just want a smoother deployment experience, feel free to check it out and use it.