As my very few readers may have noticed, I recently changed the theme of this blog. At the same time, I also switched from Ghost to Hugo. Here is the Python script I developed to migrate my ghost database to Hugo:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sqlite3
import json
from datetime import datetime


conn = sqlite3.connect('ghost.db')
conn.row_factory = sqlite3.Row

c = conn.cursor()
c2 = conn.cursor()

l = []

for i in c.execute('''
SELECT id, title, meta_description as description, slug, markdown as text,
status as draft, page, meta_title, image,
DATE(published_at/1000, "unixepoch") as date,
DATE(created_at/1000, "unixepoch") as date2
FROM posts'''):
    g = {i.keys()[e]: tuple(i)[e] for e in range(len(i.keys()))}
    t = (i['id'],)
    g['tags'] = [e['name'] for e in c2.execute('''
SELECT t.name FROM posts_tags pt JOIN tags t ON pt.tag_id = t.id
WHERE pt.post_id=?''', t)]

    if g['date'] == None:
        g['date'] = g['date2']
    if g['draft'] == 'published':
        g['draft'] = False
    else:
        g['draft'] = True
    g.pop('date2')
    text = g.pop('text')
    text = text.replace("# ", "#")
    text = text.replace("#", "# ")
    text = text.replace("# # # ", "### ")
    text = text.replace("# # ", "## ")
    text = text.replace("\# ", "\#")
    if g['page'] == True:
        page = 'page'
    else:
        page = 'post'
    g['type'] = page
    g.pop('page')
    f = open("./content/%s.md" % (g['title']), "w")
    f.write(json.dumps(g, sort_keys=True, indent=4, separators=(',', ': ')))
    f.write('\n\n\n')
    f.write(text)
    f.close()

Note that this expects your ghost database to be a sqlite3 database called ghost.db, in the same directory as the script.

This is on github, in case you want to fork it and submit a pull request.

It is not perfect, and contains a hack to take into account the fact that ghost allows a header to start with just “#”, while hugo expects “# ” (a space after the hash). This will only fix up to three #s.

There are also a number of other differences between ghost and hugo that you may have to account for manually. You can also check out my fork of the Vienna theme. Finally, you may want to use your web server to redirect /rss and /feed to /index.xml.