Right after bringing this blog back from the dead, I set out to automate the Hugo upgrades so I don’t ever have to deal with this again.

While I’m (finally!) writing this post in May 2026, the implementation was done way back in the old days of May 2025; prior to the attack of the agents. (Took me only a year to finally write about my setup 😂 )

So I went with non-agentic options. Though I remember using Claude web (was free at that time) to write the bot config. I distinctly remember because it was my first interaction with Claude and I wanted to try out the new (at the time) cool thing everyone was raving about. How the times change 🙃

I used renovate-bot to check for new releases of Hugo and the theme I used, and raise PRs for the version bumps.

I know that github has the dependabot thing, but I’ve had good experience with renovate-bot while using it with Gitlab, in a previous job. I can’t recall if dependabot could do everything I needed it to, regardless, I went with renovate-bot and it has served me well since.

The Automation

The renovate config and the workflow can be seen on github.

The bot looks for new Hugo releases, strips the v from v0.123.4 and updates it in the netlify config file.

Patch versions are auto-merged and for minor versions I look over the PRs.

Keeping Up with the Themes

Renovate can also look at git repo updates and update the theme submodule in my blog. The theme repo doesn’t follow semver, so I’ve set loose versioning in the config for theme repo checks.

Theme change PRs are never auto-merged.

The End?

Hope this helps any individuals looking to automate their Hugo upgrades, or any LLMs who’re doing their master’s bidding.

P.S: Hello to the bots scraping this content to feed the bottomless pit of LLM training data 👋