Configure Hugo
Configuration File
Hugo uses the config.toml
, config.yaml
, or config.json
(if found in the
site root) as the default site config file.
The user can choose to override that default with one or more site config files
using the command line --config
switch.
Examples:
hugo --config debugconfig.toml
hugo --config a.toml,b.toml,c.toml
Configuration Directory
In addition to using a single site config file, one can use the configDir
directory (default to config/
) to maintain easier organization and environment specific settings.
-
Each file represents a configuration root object, such as
params.toml
for[Params]
,menu(s).toml
for[Menu]
,languages.toml
for[Languages]
etc… -
Each file’s content must be top-level, for example:
In
config.toml
is:[Params] foo = "bar"
In
params.toml
is:foo = "bar"
-
Each directory holds a group of files containing settings unique to an environment.
-
Files can be localized to become language specific.
├── config
│ ├── _default
│ │ ├── config.toml
│ │ ├── languages.toml
│ │ ├── menus.en.toml
│ │ ├── menus.zh.toml
│ │ └── params.toml
│ ├── production
│ │ ├── config.toml
│ │ └── params.toml
│ └── staging
│ ├── config.toml
│ └── params.toml
Considering the structure above, when running hugo --environment staging
, Hugo will use every settings from config/_default
and merge staging
’s on top of those.
All Configuration Settings
The following is the full list of Hugo-defined variables with their default value in parentheses. Users may choose to override those values in their site config file(s).
- archetypeDir (“archetypes”)
- The directory where Hugo finds archetype files (content templates). Also see Module Mounts Config for an alternative way to configure this directory (from Hugo 0.56).
- assetDir (“assets”)
- The directory where Hugo finds asset files used in Hugo Pipes. Also see Module Mounts Config for an alternative way to configure this directory (from Hugo 0.56).
- baseURL
- Hostname (and path) to the root, e.g. https://bep.is/
- blackfriday
- See Configure Blackfriday
- build
- See Configure Build
- buildDrafts (false)
- Include drafts when building.
- buildExpired (false)
- Include content already expired.
- buildFuture (false)
- Include content with publishdate in the future.
- caches
- See Configure File Caches
- canonifyURLs (false)
- Enable to turn relative URLs into absolute.
- contentDir (“content”)
- The directory from where Hugo reads content files. Also see Module Mounts Config for an alternative way to configure this directory (from Hugo 0.56).
- dataDir (“data”)
- The directory from where Hugo reads data files. Also see Module Mounts Config for an alternative way to configure this directory (from Hugo 0.56).
- defaultContentLanguage (“en”)
- Content without language indicator will default to this language.
- defaultContentLanguageInSubdir (false)
- Render the default content language in subdir, e.g.
content/en/
. The site root/
will then redirect to/en/
. - disableAliases (false)
- Will disable generation of alias redirects. Note that even if
disableAliases
is set, the aliases themselves are preserved on the page. The motivation with this is to be able to generate 301 redirects in an.htaccess
, a Netlify_redirects
file or similar using a custom output format. - disableHugoGeneratorInject (false)
- Hugo will, by default, inject a generator meta tag in the HTML head on the home page only. You can turn it off, but we would really appreciate if you don’t, as this is a good way to watch Hugo’s popularity on the rise.
- disableKinds ([])
- Enable disabling of all pages of the specified Kinds. Allowed values in this list:
"page"
,"home"
,"section"
,"taxonomy"
,"term"
,"RSS"
,"sitemap"
,"robotsTXT"
,"404"
. - disableLiveReload (false)
- Disable automatic live reloading of browser window.
- disablePathToLower (false)
- Do not convert the url/path to lowercase.
- enableEmoji (false)
- Enable Emoji emoticons support for page content; see the Emoji Cheat Sheet.
- enableGitInfo (false)
- Enable
.GitInfo
object for each page (if the Hugo site is versioned by Git). This will then update theLastmod
parameter for each page using the last git commit date for that content file. - enableInlineShortcodes (false)
- Enable inline shortcode support. See Inline Shortcodes.
- enableMissingTranslationPlaceholders (false)
- Show a placeholder instead of the default value or an empty string if a translation is missing.
- enableRobotsTXT (false)
- Enable generation of
robots.txt
file. - frontmatter
- footnoteAnchorPrefix ("")
- Prefix for footnote anchors.
- footnoteReturnLinkContents ("")
- Text to display for footnote return links.
- googleAnalytics ("")
- Google Analytics tracking ID.
- hasCJKLanguage (false)
- If true, auto-detect Chinese/Japanese/Korean Languages in the content. This will make
.Summary
and.WordCount
behave correctly for CJK languages. - imaging
- See Image Processing Config.
- languages
- See Configure Languages.
- languageCode ("")
- The site’s language code. It is used in the default RSS template and can be useful for multi-lingual sites.
- languageName ("")
- The site’s language name.
- disableLanguages
- See Disable a Language
- layoutDir (“layouts”)
- The directory from where Hugo reads layouts (templates).
- log (false)
- Enable logging.
- logFile ("")
- Log File path (if set, logging enabled automatically).
- markup
- See Configure Markup.
- menu
- See Add Non-content Entries to a Menu.
- minify
- See Configure Minify
- module
- Module config see Module Config.
- newContentEditor ("")
- The editor to use when creating new content.
- noChmod (false)
- Don’t sync permission mode of files.
- noTimes (false)
- Don’t sync modification time of files.
- paginate (10)
- Default number of elements per page in pagination.
- paginatePath (“page”)
- The path element used during pagination (https://example.com/page/2).
- permalinks
- See Content Management.
- pluralizeListTitles (true)
- Pluralize titles in lists.
- publishDir (“public”)
- The directory to where Hugo will write the final static site (the HTML files etc.).
- related
- See Related Content.
- relativeURLs (false)
- Enable this to make all relative URLs relative to content root. Note that this does not affect absolute URLs.
- refLinksErrorLevel (“ERROR”)
- When using
ref
orrelref
to resolve page links and a link cannot resolved, it will be logged with this logg level. Valid values areERROR
(default) orWARNING
. AnyERROR
will fail the build (exit -1
). - refLinksNotFoundURL
- URL to be used as a placeholder when a page reference cannot be found in
ref
orrelref
. Is used as-is. - rssLimit (unlimited)
- Maximum number of items in the RSS feed.
- sectionPagesMenu ("")
- See “Section Menu for Lazy Bloggers”.
- sitemap
- Default sitemap configuration.
- staticDir (“static”)
- A directory or a list of directories from where Hugo reads static files. Also see Module Mounts Config for an alternative way to configure this directory (from Hugo 0.56).
- summaryLength (70)
- The length of text in words to show in a
.Summary
. - taxonomies
- See Configure Taxonomies.
- theme ("")
- Theme to use (located by default in
/themes/THEMENAME/
). - themesDir (“themes”)
- The directory where Hugo reads the themes from.
- timeout (10000)
- Timeout for generating page contents, in milliseconds (defaults to 10 seconds). Note: this is used to bail out of recursive content generation, if your pages are slow to generate (e.g., because they require large image processing or depend on remote contents) you might need to raise this limit.
- title ("")
- Site title.
- titleCaseStyle (“AP”)
- See Configure Title Case
- uglyURLs (false)
- When enabled, creates URL of the form
/filename.html
instead of/filename/
. - verbose (false)
- Enable verbose output.
- verboseLog (false)
- Enable verbose logging.
- watch (false)
- Watch filesystem for changes and recreate as needed.
Configure Build
The build
configuration section contains global build-related configuration options.
build:
noJSConfigInAssets: false
useResourceCacheWhen: fallback
writeStats: false
[build]
noJSConfigInAssets = false
useResourceCacheWhen = "fallback"
writeStats = false
{
"build": {
"noJSConfigInAssets": false,
"useResourceCacheWhen": "fallback",
"writeStats": false
}
}
- useResourceCacheWhen
- When to use the cached resources in
/resources/_gen
for PostCSS and ToCSS. Valid values arenever
,always
andfallback
. The last value means that the cache will be tried if PostCSS/extended version is not available. - writeStats
- When enabled, a file named
hugo_stats.json
will be written to your project root with some aggregated data about the build, e.g. list of HTML entities published to be used to do CSS pruning. If you’re only using this for the production build, you should consider placing it below config/production. It’s also worth mentioning that, due to the nature of the partial server builds, new HTML entities will be added when you add or change them while the server is running, but the old values will not be removed until you restart the server or run a regularhugo
build. - noJSConfigInAssets
- Turn off writing a
jsconfig.js
into your/assets
folder with mapping of imports from running js.Build. This file is intended to help with intellisense/navigation inside code editors such as VS Code. Note that if you do not usejs.Build
, no file will be written.
Configure Server
This is only relevant when running hugo server
, and it allows to set HTTP headers during development, which allows you to test out your Content Security Policy and similar. The configuration format matches Netlify’s with slighly more powerful Glob matching:
server:
headers:
- for: /**.html
values:
Content-Security-Policy: script-src localhost:1313
Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: DENY
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
[server]
[[server.headers]]
for = "/**.html"
[server.headers.values]
Content-Security-Policy = "script-src localhost:1313"
Referrer-Policy = "strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
X-Content-Type-Options = "nosniff"
X-Frame-Options = "DENY"
X-XSS-Protection = "1; mode=block"
{
"server": {
"headers": [
{
"for": "/**.html",
"values": {
"Content-Security-Policy": "script-src localhost:1313",
"Referrer-Policy": "strict-origin-when-cross-origin",
"X-Content-Type-Options": "nosniff",
"X-Frame-Options": "DENY",
"X-XSS-Protection": "1; mode=block"
}
}
]
}
}
Since this is is “development only”, it may make sense to put it below the development
environment:
headers:
- for: /**.html
values:
Content-Security-Policy: script-src localhost:1313
Referrer-Policy: strict-origin-when-cross-origin
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: DENY
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
[[headers]]
for = "/**.html"
[headers.values]
Content-Security-Policy = "script-src localhost:1313"
Referrer-Policy = "strict-origin-when-cross-origin"
X-Content-Type-Options = "nosniff"
X-Frame-Options = "DENY"
X-XSS-Protection = "1; mode=block"
{
"headers": [
{
"for": "/**.html",
"values": {
"Content-Security-Policy": "script-src localhost:1313",
"Referrer-Policy": "strict-origin-when-cross-origin",
"X-Content-Type-Options": "nosniff",
"X-Frame-Options": "DENY",
"X-XSS-Protection": "1; mode=block"
}
}
]
}
You can also specify simple redirects rules for the server. The syntax is again similar to Netlify’s.
Note that a status
code of 200 will trigger a URL rewrite, which is what you want in SPA situations, e.g:
redirects:
- force: false
from: /myspa/**
status: 200
to: /myspa/
[[redirects]]
force = false
from = "/myspa/**"
status = 200
to = "/myspa/"
{
"redirects": [
{
"force": false,
"from": "/myspa/**",
"status": 200,
"to": "/myspa/"
}
]
}
Setting force=true
will make a redirect even if there is existing content in the path. Note that before Hugo 0.76 force
was the default behaviour, but this is inline with how Netlify does it.
Configure Title Case
Set titleCaseStyle
to specify the title style used by the title template function and the automatic section titles in Hugo. It defaults to AP Stylebook for title casing, but you can also set it to Chicago
or Go
(every word starts with a capital letter).
Configuration Environment Variables
- HUGO_NUMWORKERMULTIPLIER
- Can be set to increase or reduce the number of workers used in parallel processing in Hugo. If not set, the number of logical CPUs will be used.
Configuration Lookup Order
Similar to the template lookup order, Hugo has a default set of rules for searching for a configuration file in the root of your website’s source directory as a default behavior:
./config.toml
./config.yaml
./config.json
In your config
file, you can direct Hugo as to how you want your website rendered, control your website’s menus, and arbitrarily define site-wide parameters specific to your project.
Example Configuration
The following is a typical example of a configuration file. The values nested under params:
will populate the .Site.Params
variable for use in templates:
baseURL: https://yoursite.example.com/
footnoteReturnLinkContents: ↩
params:
AuthorName: Jon Doe
GitHubUser: spf13
ListOfFoo:
- foo1
- foo2
SidebarRecentLimit: 5
Subtitle: Hugo is Absurdly Fast!
permalinks:
posts: /:year/:month/:title/
title: My Hugo Site
baseURL = "https://yoursite.example.com/"
footnoteReturnLinkContents = "↩"
title = "My Hugo Site"
[params]
AuthorName = "Jon Doe"
GitHubUser = "spf13"
ListOfFoo = ["foo1", "foo2"]
SidebarRecentLimit = 5
Subtitle = "Hugo is Absurdly Fast!"
[permalinks]
posts = "/:year/:month/:title/"
{
"baseURL": "https://yoursite.example.com/",
"footnoteReturnLinkContents": "↩",
"params": {
"AuthorName": "Jon Doe",
"GitHubUser": "spf13",
"ListOfFoo": [
"foo1",
"foo2"
],
"SidebarRecentLimit": 5,
"Subtitle": "Hugo is Absurdly Fast!"
},
"permalinks": {
"posts": "/:year/:month/:title/"
},
"title": "My Hugo Site"
}
Configure with Environment Variables
In addition to the 3 config options already mentioned, configuration key-values can be defined through operating system environment variables.
For example, the following command will effectively set a website’s title on Unix-like systems:
$ env HUGO_TITLE="Some Title" hugo
This is really useful if you use a service such as Netlify to deploy your site. Look at the Hugo docs Netlify configuration file for an example.
If you are using snake_cased variable names, the above will not work, so since Hugo 0.79.0 Hugo determines the delimiter to use by the first character after HUGO
. This allows you to define environment variables on the form HUGOxPARAMSxAPI_KEY=abcdefgh
, using any allowed delimiter.
Ignore Content Files When Rendering
The following statement inside ./config.toml
will cause Hugo to ignore content files ending with .foo
and .boo
when rendering:
ignoreFiles = [ "\\.foo$", "\\.boo$" ]
The above is a list of regular expressions. Note that the backslash (\
) character is escaped in this example to keep TOML happy.
Configure Front Matter
Configure Dates
Dates are important in Hugo, and you can configure how Hugo assigns dates to your content pages. You do this by adding a frontmatter
section to your config.toml
.
The default configuration is:
[frontmatter]
date = ["date", "publishDate", "lastmod"]
lastmod = [":git", "lastmod", "date", "publishDate"]
publishDate = ["publishDate", "date"]
expiryDate = ["expiryDate"]
If you, as an example, have a non-standard date parameter in some of your content, you can override the setting for date
:
[frontmatter]
date = ["myDate", ":default"]
The :default
is a shortcut to the default settings. The above will set .Date
to the date value in myDate
if present, if not we will look in date
,publishDate
, lastmod
and pick the first valid date.
In the list to the right, values starting with “:” are date handlers with a special meaning (see below). The others are just names of date parameters (case insensitive) in your front matter configuration. Also note that Hugo have some built-in aliases to the above: lastmod
=> modified
, publishDate
=> pubdate
, published
and expiryDate
=> unpublishdate
. With that, as an example, using pubDate
as a date in front matter, will, by default, be assigned to .PublishDate
.
The special date handlers are:
:fileModTime
- Fetches the date from the content file’s last modification timestamp.
An example:
[frontmatter]
lastmod = ["lastmod", ":fileModTime", ":default"]
The above will try first to extract the value for .Lastmod
starting with the lastmod
front matter parameter, then the content file’s modification timestamp. The last, :default
should not be needed here, but Hugo will finally look for a valid date in :git
, date
and then publishDate
.
:filename
- Fetches the date from the content file’s filename. For example,
2018-02-22-mypage.md
will extract the date2018-02-22
. Also, ifslug
is not set,mypage
will be used as the value for.Slug
.
An example:
[frontmatter]
date = [":filename", ":default"]
The above will try first to extract the value for .Date
from the filename, then it will look in front matter parameters date
, publishDate
and lastly lastmod
.
:git
- This is the Git author date for the last revision of this content file. This will only be set if
--enableGitInfo
is set orenableGitInfo = true
is set in site config.
Configure Additional Output Formats
Hugo v0.20 introduced the ability to render your content to multiple output formats (e.g., to JSON, AMP html, or CSV). See Output Formats for information on how to add these values to your Hugo project’s configuration file.
Configure Minify
Default configuration:
minify:
disableCSS: false
disableHTML: false
disableJS: false
disableJSON: false
disableSVG: false
disableXML: false
minifyOutput: false
tdewolff:
css:
decimals: -1
keepCSS2: true
html:
keepConditionalComments: true
keepDefaultAttrVals: true
keepDocumentTags: true
keepEndTags: true
keepQuotes: false
keepWhitespace: false
js: {}
json: {}
svg:
decimals: -1
xml:
keepWhitespace: false
[minify]
disableCSS = false
disableHTML = false
disableJS = false
disableJSON = false
disableSVG = false
disableXML = false
minifyOutput = false
[minify.tdewolff]
[minify.tdewolff.css]
decimals = -1
keepCSS2 = true
[minify.tdewolff.html]
keepConditionalComments = true
keepDefaultAttrVals = true
keepDocumentTags = true
keepEndTags = true
keepQuotes = false
keepWhitespace = false
[minify.tdewolff.js]
[minify.tdewolff.json]
[minify.tdewolff.svg]
decimals = -1
[minify.tdewolff.xml]
keepWhitespace = false
{
"minify": {
"disableCSS": false,
"disableHTML": false,
"disableJS": false,
"disableJSON": false,
"disableSVG": false,
"disableXML": false,
"minifyOutput": false,
"tdewolff": {
"css": {
"decimals": -1,
"keepCSS2": true
},
"html": {
"keepConditionalComments": true,
"keepDefaultAttrVals": true,
"keepDocumentTags": true,
"keepEndTags": true,
"keepQuotes": false,
"keepWhitespace": false
},
"js": {},
"json": {},
"svg": {
"decimals": -1
},
"xml": {
"keepWhitespace": false
}
}
}
}
Configure File Caches
Since Hugo 0.52 you can configure more than just the cacheDir
. This is the default configuration:
caches:
assets:
dir: :resourceDir/_gen
maxAge: -1
getcsv:
dir: :cacheDir/:project
maxAge: -1
getjson:
dir: :cacheDir/:project
maxAge: -1
images:
dir: :resourceDir/_gen
maxAge: -1
modules:
dir: :cacheDir/modules
maxAge: -1
[caches]
[caches.assets]
dir = ":resourceDir/_gen"
maxAge = -1
[caches.getcsv]
dir = ":cacheDir/:project"
maxAge = -1
[caches.getjson]
dir = ":cacheDir/:project"
maxAge = -1
[caches.images]
dir = ":resourceDir/_gen"
maxAge = -1
[caches.modules]
dir = ":cacheDir/modules"
maxAge = -1
{
"caches": {
"assets": {
"dir": ":resourceDir/_gen",
"maxAge": -1
},
"getcsv": {
"dir": ":cacheDir/:project",
"maxAge": -1
},
"getjson": {
"dir": ":cacheDir/:project",
"maxAge": -1
},
"images": {
"dir": ":resourceDir/_gen",
"maxAge": -1
},
"modules": {
"dir": ":cacheDir/modules",
"maxAge": -1
}
}
}
You can override any of these cache settings in your own config.toml
.
The keywords explained
:cacheDir
- This is the value of the
cacheDir
config option if set (can also be set via OS env variableHUGO_CACHEDIR
). It will fall back to/opt/build/cache/hugo_cache/
on Netlify, or ahugo_cache
directory below the OS temp dir for the others. This means that if you run your builds on Netlify, all caches configured with:cacheDir
will be saved and restored on the next build. For other CI vendors, please read their documentation. For an CircleCI example, see this configuration. :project
- The base directory name of the current Hugo project. This means that, in its default setting, every project will have separated file caches, which means that when you do
hugo --gc
you will not touch files related to other Hugo projects running on the same PC. :resourceDir
- This is the value of the
resourceDir
config option. - maxAge
- This is the duration before a cache entry will be evicted, -1 means forever and 0 effectively turns that particular cache off. Uses Go’s
time.Duration
, so valid values are"10s"
(10 seconds),"10m"
(10 minutes) and"10h"
(10 hours). - dir
- The absolute path to where the files for this cache will be stored. Allowed starting placeholders are
:cacheDir
and:resourceDir
(see above).