Hugo

Development

To start a development server and watch for file changes:

$ hugo server -w

Sometimes when watching for changes the server will get out-of-sync with the current state of the files. If this is happening frequently, you can use the --disableFastRender flag to force Hugo to rebuild from scratch each time there are changes.

$ hugo server -w --disableFastRender

However, this will slow down build times, which may become an issue for larger sites.

Templating

You can tell Hugo to automatically remove whitespace between HTML tags and template output by adding the hyphen - next to the {{ and }} delimiters.

Without hyphens:

<div>
{{ .Title }}
</div>

will result in:

<div>
My Page Title
</div>

With hyphens:

<div>
{{- .Title -}}
</div>

will result in (notice that whitespace is removed):

<div>My Page Title</div>

Printing Variables

You can easily debug variables by printing them to the HTML and then viewing the output in your browser (by building the site).

You can print a variable by just doing:

{{ $myVariable }}