hexo-theme-arknights: a Hexo theme with six comment backends

What the theme is and where it came from

The theme is a Hexo theme built around the visual identity of the Rhodes Island faction from the Arknights game, and the package description says as much. It is the kind of project that starts as a personal blog skin and grows into a general purpose theme, and the readme shows the tell in the first section, which is a long list of the people who have used the theme, each with their site link, and an invitation at the end for anyone using it to open a pull request and add themselves to that list. The repository carries a separate friend links file at the root, so the list is maintained as a file rather than being edited into the documentation by hand. The theme ships readmes in Simplified Chinese, English and Japanese, and the metadata declares the author with a repository under the Yue-plus organisation. The live demo is hosted on a domain under the author's own subdomain, and there is a preview image at the root. The site itself is a static blog, and the theme is a set of layouts, scripts and styles that Hexo renders with.

The install path, and the three plugins you need

Setting the theme up takes four commands in a fresh Hexo project, and the documentation recommends the cnpm package manager for users in mainland China, pointing at the China npm mirror:

hexo init Hexo
cd Hexo
cnpm install
git clone https://github.com/Yue-plus/hexo-theme-arknights.git themes/arknights --depth=1

The theme is cloned into the themes directory with a shallow clone, which is the right call since the theme repository carries its own history and the blog only needs the files. Three rendering and serving plugins are then required, and the theme's own package metadata lists them as dependencies, which is a helpful detail because it means they are installed along with the theme when it is set up as a package rather than cloned by hand. The install command for npm users is:

cnpm install hexo-server hexo-browsersync hexo-renderer-pug --save

And the yarn equivalent is:

yarn add hexo-server hexo-browsersync hexo-renderer-pug

The server and browser sync plugins are what you see in development, and the pug renderer is what compiles the theme's templates, since the theme is written in pug rather than in the default EJS or Swig templates.

The configuration split, which is the part that trips people up

The theme needs three configuration changes in the site configuration file, and the third one is unusual enough to explain. First, the theme option has to point at this theme rather than the default. Second, syntax highlighting has to be switched on, and the setting is nested:

highlight:
  hljs: true

Third, and this is the part people miss, the theme's own configuration file is cut out of the theme directory and moved up into the site directory, and renamed to a different name than it had. The reason given is that the site configuration file is the place where a Hexo user is expected to keep their settings, and there is a link to the Hexo documentation on using an alternative theme configuration file. The theme configuration carries Chinese comments against each option, so the values are explained inline. There is a note that the same file can be used as a reference for the site configuration as well. In practice this means a fresh install has a short list of edits, and the one that involves moving a file is the one that takes longest to find.

Six comment services, each with its own credential block

The comment integration is the substantial part of the theme and the reason to pick it over a plainer one. Six services are documented, each with a configuration block, each disabled by default, and each needing different credentials. Valine is backed by LeanCloud and needs an application identifier, an application key and a server domain, and the documentation has a specific note that the server domain is only required when you use the international edition of LeanCloud, along with where to find that domain in the LeanCloud application settings. Gitalk stores comments in a GitHub repository and needs the client identifier and secret of a GitHub application, the repository and its owner, the list of administrators, and an optional unique page identifier. Waline is self-hosted and has a locale block where every field is optional and the defaults are kept for anything you leave out, and the default language falls back to en-US when the current language is not supported. Artalk needs a server address and an optional site name, and the block is three lines long. Utterances uses a GitHub issues repository and needs the owner and name, an issue term and a theme, and Giscus is listed in the feature description too.

Content features, and the maths and diagram support

The theme's own description lists support for math formulas and Mermaid diagrams alongside the comment systems, and the write-up explains how posts are marked up. The front matter format is the standard Hexo one, with a title, a date, tags and a category:

---
title: 'Hello World !'
date: 2020-04-15 21:54:02
tags: code
category: Example
---

The summary convention is also described, where content placed before a more marker becomes the excerpt shown on the index page, with an option to also show it in the body. A theme repository carries a branch with sample posts that can be taken and reused. Pages are added to the navigation bar by creating them with the new page command, which produces a directory in the source folder, editing the markdown inside it, and then adding an entry to the theme configuration under a menu key:

menu:
  About: /about

There is also a documented setting for disabling pagination on the archive page, found in the site configuration file around line 88, where the per-page value is set to zero and a comment in the block explains that a value of zero disables pagination.

The assets you replace, and the state of the releases

A handful of files are meant to be edited by the person using the theme, and the readme lists them precisely. In the source directory of the site there is a file for a custom domain when deploying to GitHub Pages, and an image directory holding two payment QR codes for Alipay and WeChat, with a note that they should be square images at a one to one ratio. In the theme's own source directory there is a favicon file, with a note that it should be 64 by 64 pixels because a higher resolution will not display, and a readme for the deployment repository. The build story is small, since the package metadata has a build script that compiles a TypeScript project inside the source directory, and a test script that is a placeholder which exits with an error. The release history shows versions 1.19.0 from 2024-04-10, 1.18.0 from 2023-07-09 and 1.17.2 from 2023-02-09, with the package metadata sitting at 1.15.0, so the published package version and the release tags have drifted apart. The last push was on 2026-07-13. The licence is MIT.

Editorial conclusion

hexo-theme-arknights is a good fit for a Hexo user who wants a theme that is not the default one and who wants to pick their comment service at configuration time rather than by writing a template. It is the wrong choice if you need a maintained theme with an active issue tracker, since the last tagged release is 1.19.0 from 2024-04-10 while the last push was on 2026-07-13, so the gap between releases is large. It is also the wrong choice if you cannot run a Node build, because the theme compiles a TypeScript bundle. Before installing it, read the configuration steps in order, because the theme name setting, the separate theme configuration file and the rendering plugins all have to be in place before the first build, and the readme notes that the theme configuration file is moved rather than edited in place. The project is MIT licensed, the package version in the repository is 1.15.0, and the theme is published in Chinese, English and Japanese readmes.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. Yue-plus/hexo-theme-arknights on GitHub