Hugo

Quick Reference

Task

Command

Create a new single page

hugo new posts/a/index.md

Local preview at localhost: 1313

hugo server (-D to include drafts)

Update all submodules

git pull --recurse-submodules

Basics

Common commands

Task

Command

Install Hugo via brew

brew install hugo

Verify that Hugo is installed

which hugo or hugo version

Create a new site

hugo new site davidfeng.us

Use a theme

  1. Select a theme from Hugo Themes.

  2. Download the theme as a git submodule: git submodule add https://github.com/Track3/hermit.git themes/hermit

  3. Copy themes/hermit/exampleSite/config.toml to the top level.

Customize a theme

To customize a theme, e.g. you want to make some changes to a config.toml, an archetype, a template/layout, or a static file (favicon), either change the theme directly (in the themes/hermit directory), or copy the file you want to change to the same location on the top level and change it. Hugo will prioritize the files on the top level.

  • In config.toml, I changed the following fields: baseURL, title, googleAnalytics, disqusShortname, author name, homeSubtitle, justifyContent, social icons' names and urls, menu items. Usually Hugo server needs to be restarted after modification of config.toml.

  • In archetypes, I removed image, toc, tags, comments fields in the front matter.

  • I created layouts/shortcodes/pen.html and copied a shortcode for codepen from here.

  • I generated favicon files here and put them under static/.

Create content

Content lives in content/ directory. There are two type of pages in Hugo: list page and single page. Usually directories correspond to list pages and individual markdown files are single pages.

Single pages

Markdown file

Command to generate

URL

content/a.md

hugo new a.md

localhost:1313/a/

content/a/index.md

hugo new a/index.md

localhost:1313/a/

content/dir1/dir2/b.md

hugo new dir1/dir2/b.md

localhost:1313/dir1/dir2/b/

The hugo new path/file command populates the markdown file according to the archetypes.

I usually use an index.md page as my single page so that I can put related assets (e.g. images) in the same directory.

List pages

If you create a file at content/dir1/dir2/_index.html, localhost:1313/dir1/dir2/ will points to a HTML file generated based on the _index.html. content/dir1/dir2/ becomes a section and the list page contains links to all pages in this section. It seems all pages in this section will NOT appear in the list page of the parent section anymore. Hugo automatically creates list page for top level directories in content/.

Publish and Deploy

In each markdown file, remove the draft: true in the front matter to publish.

The hugo command will generates a public/ folder, which you can put on the server. Don't forget to add public/ to .gitignore file.

Alternatively, if you host your site on Netlify, when you push your changes to GitHub, Netlify will rebuild and publish your site.

Advanced

Template

To create a template is basically to create you own theme. You can either put the files in themes/your_theme/layouts/, or in the layouts/ at top level which override the same file in the themes.

  • Default template: the list.html and single.html in layouts/_default/.

  • Homepage template: layouts/index.html.

  • Section template: if you want to have a special template for the list pages in posts/, create a file at layouts/posts/list.html for it.

Base template

We can put common parts of list.html and single.html into a base template, i.e. baseof.html:

<!-- Common parts before "main" block -->
{{ block "main" . }}
<!-- The "main" block from single.html or list.html will be inserted here -->
{{ end }}
{{ block "footer" . }}
    This is the default baseof footer
{{ end }}

single.html:

{{ define "main" }}
    This is the single template
{{ end }}
<!-- We can optionally override the default baseof footer here -->

list.html:

{{ define "main" }}
    This is the list template
{{ end }}

Partial templates

layouts/partials/. For example, we can have a header.html file for header template.

<!-- layouts/partials/header.html -->
<h1>{{ .Title }}</h1>

<!-- layouts/_default/single.html -->
{{ partial "header" . }} // dot is the parameter passed into the partial

Custom variables:

<!-- layouts/partials/header.html -->
<h1>{{ .myVar }}</h1>

<!-- layouts/_default/single.html -->
{{ partial "header" (dict "myVar" "myValue" "myVar2" "myValue2") }} // we pass in a dict instead of dot

Hugo Variables

Only available in templates (layouts/), not available in content/.

General form: {{ .Title }}. Common variables: .Date, .URL, .Content.

Custom variables

  • In front matter in markdown: myVar: "myValue", you can access it in the template by .Params.myVar. If you did not define it, nothing shows up. No errors. For example:

<h1 style="color: {{ .Params.color }};">title</h1>

  • In template: for example:

{{ $myVar := “aString” }} // define the value, could be string, number, or boolean
{{ $myVar }} // access the value

Hugo Functions

Again, functions are only available in layouts/, not in content/.

General form: {{ funcName param1 param2 }}. Examples:

{{ truncate 10 "this is a long string" }}
{{ singularize "dogs" }}

<!-- in list.html -->
{{ range .Pages }}
  <ul>
    <li><a href=“{{.URL}}”>{{ .Title }}</a></li> // here the Title is from each individual page
  </ul>
{{ end }}

<!-- conditions -->
{{ $var1 := “dog” }}
{{ $var2 := “cat” }}
{{ if eq $var1 $var2 }}
    // do something
{{else}}
    // do something
{{end}}

<!-- more complex conditions -->
{{ if and (…) (…) }}
    // do something
{{ end }}

A real example - highlight current page's title in a menu:

{{ $title := .Title }}
<ul>
{{ range .Site.Pages }}
    <li><a href="{{ .URL }}" style="{{ if eq .Title $title }} background-color: yellow;{{ end }}">{{ .Title }} </a></li>
</ul>

Archetypes

Under archetypes directory, the default.md defines the front matter and common content of the markdown files when you create it via hugo new.

The archetypes/dir1.md file applies to new files created by hugo new dir1/new-file.md.

Shortcodes

We can embed resources from other websites (e.g. YouTube) using shortcodes without writing a long iframe HTML code. For example, to embed a YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xkNJL4gJ9E, All I need to do is to add {{</* youtube 2xkNJL4gJ9E */>}} in the markdown file. Hugo will expand that "shortcode" into the iframe HTML code.

Hugo has built-in shortcodes for Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. See the official doc for more.

Custom shortcode / shortcode template

Another way of thinking shortcodes is to treat them as functions (in the context of programming). The general form of shortcode is:

{{</* my-shortcode params */>}}

which is basically just

myFunc(params)

To use the custom shortcode (call the function) in the markdown files in content/, we need to add a shortcode template in layouts/shortcodes/shortcode-name.html (define the function).

In the markdown file, a shortcode can take in positional (e.g. {{</* youtube 2xkNJL4gJ9E */>}}) or named parameters (e.g. {{</* img src="a.png" */>}}).

In the template, use {{.Get 0}} or {{.Get "src"}} to get the passed in values.

In the following case, the template cannot use quotes to wrap color, so ` is used instead.

<p style="color:{{.Get `color`}}">Text Text</p>

Double tag shortcode

Use a double tag shortcode if you want to pass in a large block of text.

In the markdown file, call it as follows:

{{</* my-shortcode */>}}
    This is some text
{{</* /my-shortcode */>}}

In the template, access the text between the opening and closing tags via {{.Inner}}.

If the inner text needs further markdown processing (e.g. **bold**), call the shortcode with % % instead of < >:

{{%/* my-shortcode */%}}
    **bold**
{{%/* /my-shortcode */%}}

Taxonomies

Pages in content/ can be grouped by taxonomies. The default two taxonomies are tags and categories. In config.toml, add the following lines:

[taxonomies]
  tag = "tags"
  category = "categories"

To disable category, use category = "". To add a custom taxomony (e.g. mood), add mood = "moods".

In content markdown files, the front matters can contain taxonomy information:

tags: ["tag1", "tag2"]
categories: [“cat1”]

In the single page, tag1 links to localhost:1313/tags/tag1/, which is a list page that shows all single pages with tag1 as one of their tags.

Data Files

data/ directory: we can put json, yaml, and toml files. For example, we can have a states.json, which contains an array of "state" objects, which have a "name" field. and in templates:

{{ range .Site.Data.states }}
  {{ .name }}<br>
{{ end }}

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