Quick Start

Hugo help

$ hugo help
hugo is the main command, used to build your Hugo site.

Hugo is a Fast and Flexible Static Site Generator
built with love by spf13 and friends in Go.

Complete documentation is available at http://gohugo.io/.

Usage:
  hugo [flags]
  hugo [command]

Available Commands:
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  config      Print the site configuration
  convert     Convert your content to different formats
  deploy      Deploy your site to a Cloud provider.
  env         Print Hugo version and environment info
  gen         A collection of several useful generators.
  help        Help about any command
  import      Import your site from others.
  list        Listing out various types of content
  mod         Various Hugo Modules helpers.
  new         Create new content for your site
  server      A high performance webserver
  version     Print the version number of Hugo

Flags:
  -b, --baseURL string             hostname (and path) to the root, e.g. http://spf13.com/
  -D, --buildDrafts                include content marked as draft
  -E, --buildExpired               include expired content
  -F, --buildFuture                include content with publishdate in the future
      --cacheDir string            filesystem path to cache directory. Defaults: $TMPDIR/hugo_cache/
      --cleanDestinationDir        remove files from destination not found in static directories
      --config string              config file (default is path/config.yaml|json|toml)
      --configDir string           config dir (default "config")
  -c, --contentDir string          filesystem path to content directory
      --debug                      debug output
  -d, --destination string         filesystem path to write files to
      --disableKinds strings       disable different kind of pages (home, RSS etc.)
      --enableGitInfo              add Git revision, date, author, and CODEOWNERS info to the pages
  -e, --environment string         build environment
      --forceSyncStatic            copy all files when static is changed.
      --gc                         enable to run some cleanup tasks (remove unused cache files) after the build
  -h, --help                       help for hugo
      --ignoreCache                ignores the cache directory
      --ignoreVendorPaths string   ignores any _vendor for module paths matching the given Glob pattern
  -l, --layoutDir string           filesystem path to layout directory
      --log                        enable Logging
      --logFile string             log File path (if set, logging enabled automatically)
      --minify                     minify any supported output format (HTML, XML etc.)
      --noChmod                    don't sync permission mode of files
      --noTimes                    don't sync modification time of files
      --panicOnWarning             panic on first WARNING log
      --poll string                set this to a poll interval, e.g --poll 700ms, to use a poll based approach to watch for file system changes
      --printI18nWarnings          print missing translations
      --printMemoryUsage           print memory usage to screen at intervals
      --printPathWarnings          print warnings on duplicate target paths etc.
      --printUnusedTemplates       print warnings on unused templates.
      --quiet                      build in quiet mode
      --renderToMemory             render to memory (only useful for benchmark testing)
  -s, --source string              filesystem path to read files relative from
      --templateMetrics            display metrics about template executions
      --templateMetricsHints       calculate some improvement hints when combined with --templateMetrics
  -t, --theme strings              themes to use (located in /themes/THEMENAME/)
      --themesDir string           filesystem path to themes directory
      --trace file                 write trace to file (not useful in general)
  -v, --verbose                    verbose output
      --verboseLog                 verbose logging
  -w, --watch                      watch filesystem for changes and recreate as needed

Use "hugo [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Create a new post

$ hugo new post/hello-world.md

Run server

$ hugo server -D

Build static pages

$ hugo -D
# force clean public folder
$ hugo -F --cleanDestinationDir

Deploy to remote sites

For reference, I used Github to host my Hugo website source code, and then used Cloudflare Pages integration to deploy my website and global CDN acceleration service.

For more information, you can refer to the Hugo’s official documentation-deployment section.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Solutions to some common Hugo problems.

Note: The answers/solutions presented below are short, and may not be enough to solve your problem. Visit Hugo Discourse and use the search. It that does not help, start a new topic and ask your questions.

I can’t see my content!

Is your markdown file in draft mode? When testing, run hugo server with the -D or --buildDrafts switch.

Can I set configuration variables via OS environment?

Yes you can! See Configure with Environment Variables.

How do I schedule posts?

  1. Set publishDate in the page Front Matter to a datetime in the future. If you want the creation and publication datetime to be the same, it’s also sufficient to only set date.
  2. Build and publish at intervals.

How to automate the “publish at intervals” part depends on your situation:

  • If you deploy from your own PC/server, you can automate with Cron or similar.
  • If your site is hosted on a service similar to Netlify you can use a service such as ifttt to schedule the updates.

Can I use the latest Hugo version on Netlify?

Yes you can! Read this.

I get “TOCSS … this feature is not available in your current Hugo version”

If you process SCSS or SASS to CSS in your Hugo project, you need the Hugo extended version, or else you may see this error message:

error: failed to transform resource: TOCSS: failed to transform "scss/main.scss" (text/x-scss): this feature is not available in your current Hugo version

We release two set of binaries for technical reasons. The extended version is not what you get by default for some installation methods. On the release page, look for archives with extended in the name. To build hugo-extended, use go install --tags extended

To confirm, run hugo version and look for the word extended.

More info

Check documentation for more info. If you get any problems when using Hugo, you can find the answer in troubleshooting or you can ask me on GitHub.