When converting my blog from Jekyll to Hexo, Hexo ignored my custom homepage. It took me a while to find out to solve this, so hopefully this post will save you some time.

The solution

By default, Hexo ignores a custom homepage if you place it in /source/index.md. By default, you can add a page as a partial but that’s not a very elegant way to solve the issue.

If you’re using Hexo 3 like I do, you can solve this by removing the hexo-generator-index package. By default this package creates an archive of posts as a home page, but that’s not what we want. It can be removed by running:

npm remove hexo-generator-index

You can now put your index page in /source/index.md.

Don’t forget to set the layout in the front matter:

---
layout: page
title: homepage
date: 2020-10-17
---
Sources