Basic Usage

The following is a description of the most common commands you will use while developing your Hugo project. See the Command Line Reference for a comprehensive view of Hugo’s CLI.

Test Installation

Once you have installed Hugo, make sure it is in your PATH. You can test that Hugo has been installed correctly via the help command:

hugo help

The output you see in your console should be similar to the following:

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:
  benchmark   Benchmark Hugo by building a site a number of times.
  config      Print the site configuration
  convert     Convert your content to different formats
  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
  new         Create new content for your site
  server      A high performance webserver
  undraft     Undraft resets the content's draft status
  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/
      --canonifyURLs               if true, all relative URLs will be canonicalized using baseURL
      --cleanDestinationDir        remove files from destination not found in static directories
      --config string              config file (default is path/config.yaml|json|toml)
  -c, --contentDir string          filesystem path to content directory
      --debug                      debug output
  -d, --destination string         filesystem path to write files to
      --disable404                 do not render 404 page
      --disableKinds stringSlice   disable different kind of pages (home, RSS etc.)
      --disableRSS                 do not build RSS files
      --disableSitemap             do not build Sitemap file
      --enableGitInfo              add Git revision, date and author info to the pages
      --forceSyncStatic            copy all files when static is changed.
  -h, --help                       help for hugo
      --i18n-warnings              print missing translations
      --ignoreCache                ignores the cache directory
  -l, --layoutDir string           filesystem path to layout directory
      --log                        enable Logging
      --logFile string             log File path (if set, logging enabled automatically)
      --noChmod                    don't sync permission mode of files
      --noTimes                    don't sync modification time of files
      --pluralizeListTitles        pluralize titles in lists using inflect (default true)
      --preserveTaxonomyNames      preserve taxonomy names as written ("Gérard Depardieu" vs "gerard-depardieu")
      --quiet                      build in quiet mode
      --renderToMemory             render to memory (only useful for benchmark testing)
  -s, --source string              filesystem path to read files relative from
      --stepAnalysis               display memory and timing of different steps of the program
      --templateMetrics            display metrics about template executions
  -t, --theme string               theme to use (located in /themes/THEMENAME/)
      --themesDir string           filesystem path to themes directory
      --uglyURLs                   if true, use /filename.html instead of /filename/
  -v, --verbose                    verbose output
      --verboseLog                 verbose logging
  -w, --watch                      watch filesystem for changes and recreate as needed

Additional help topics:
  hugo check     Contains some verification checks

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

The hugo Command

The most common usage is probably to run hugo with your current directory being the input directory.

This generates your website to the public/ directory by default, although you can customize the output directory in your site configuration by changing the publishDir field.

The site Hugo renders into public/ is ready to be deployed to your web server:

hugo
0 draft content
0 future content
99 pages created
0 paginator pages created
16 tags created
0 groups created
in 90 ms

Draft, Future, and Expired Content

Hugo allows you to set draft, publishdate, and even expirydate in your content’s front matter. By default, Hugo will not publish:

1. Content with a future publishdate value
2. Content with draft: true status
3. Content with a past expirydate value

All three of these can be overridden during both local development and deployment by adding the following flags to hugo and hugo server, respectively, or by changing the boolean values assigned to the fields of the same name (without --) in your configuration:

1. --buildFuture
2. --buildDrafts
3. --buildExpired

LiveReload

Hugo comes with LiveReload built in. There are no additional packages to install. A common way to use Hugo while developing a site is to have Hugo run a server with the hugo server command and watch for changes:

hugo server
0 draft content
0 future content
99 pages created
0 paginator pages created
16 tags created
0 groups created
in 120 ms
Watching for changes in /Users/yourname/sites/yourhugosite/{data,content,layouts,static}
Serving pages from /Users/yourname/sites/yourhugosite/public
Web Server is available at http://localhost:1313/
Press Ctrl+C to stop

This will run a fully functioning web server while simultaneously watching your file system for additions, deletions, or changes within the following areas of your project organization:

• /static/*
• /content/*
• /data/*
• /i18n/*
• /layouts/*
• /themes/<CURRENT-THEME>/*
• config

Whenever you make changes, Hugo will simultaneously rebuild the site and continue to serve content. As soon as the build is finished, LiveReload tells the browser to silently reload the page.

Most Hugo builds are so fast that you may not notice the change unless looking directly at the site in your browser. This means that keeping the site open on a second monitor (or another half of your current monitor) allows you to see the most up-to-date version of your website without the need to leave your text editor.

Disable LiveReload

LiveReload works by injecting JavaScript into the pages Hugo generates. The script creates a connection from the browser’s web socket client to the Hugo web socket server.

LiveReload is awesome for development. However, some Hugo users may use hugo server in production to instantly display updated content. The following methods make it easy to disable LiveReload:

hugo server --watch=false

Or…

hugo server --disableLiveReload

The latter flag can be omitted by adding the following key-value to your config.toml or config.yml file, respectively:

disableLiveReload = true

disableLiveReload: true

Deploy Your Website

After running hugo server for local web development, you need to do a final hugo run without the server part of the command to rebuild your site. You may then deploy your site by copying the public/ directory to your production web server.

Since Hugo generates a static website, your site can be hosted anywhere using any web server. See Hosting and Deployment for methods for hosting and automating deployments contributed by the Hugo community.

Dev vs Deploy Destinations

Hugo does not remove generated files before building. An easy workaround is to use different directories for development and production.

To start a server that builds draft content (helpful for editing), you can specify a different destination; e.g., a dev/ directory:

hugo server -wDs ~/Code/hugo/docs -d dev

When the content is ready for publishing, use the default public/ dir:

hugo -s ~/Code/hugo/docs

This prevents draft content from accidentally becoming available.