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
```
{{% note %}}
Multiple site config files can be specified as a comma-separated string to the `--config` switch.
{{% /note %}}
{{<todo>}}TODO: distinct config.toml and others (the root object files){{</todo>}}
## 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:
- 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.
{{<new-in"0.84.0">}} The configuration merge described below was improved in Hugo 0.84.0 and made fully configurable. The big change/improvement was that we now, by default, do deep merging of `params` maps from themes.
The configuration value for `_merge` can be one of:
See [Configure File Caches](#configure-file-caches)
### cascade
{{<new-in"0.86.0">}}
Pass down down default configuration values (front matter) to pages in the content tree. The options in site config is the same as in page front matter, see [Front Matter Cascade](/content-management/front-matter#front-matter-cascade).
### canonifyURLs
**Default value:** false
Enable to turn relative URLs into absolute.
### contentDir
**Default value:** "content"
The directory from where Hugo reads content files. {{% module-mounts-note %}}
The directory from where Hugo reads data files. {{% module-mounts-note %}}
### defaultContentLanguage
**Default value:** "en"
Content without language indicator will default to this language.
### defaultContentLanguageInSubdir
**Default value:** false
Render the default content language in subdir, e.g. `content/en/`. The site root `/` will then redirect to `/en/`.
### disableAliases
**Default value:** 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
**Default value:** 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
**Default value:** []
Enable disabling of all pages of the specified *Kinds*. Allowed values in this list: `"page"`, `"home"`, `"section"`, `"taxonomy"`, `"term"`, `"RSS"`, `"sitemap"`, `"robotsTXT"`, `"404"`.
### disableLiveReload
**Default value:** false
Disable automatic live reloading of browser window.
Enable `.GitInfo` object for each page (if the Hugo site is versioned by Git). This will then update the `Lastmod` parameter for each page using the last git commit date for that content file.
A language tag as defined by [RFC 5646](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5646). The internal [RSS template](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/tpl/tplimpl/embedded/templates/_default/rss.xml) populates its `<language>` element with this value. The value is not used elsewhere.
Enable this to make all relative URLs relative to content root. Note that this does not affect absolute URLs.
### refLinksErrorLevel
**Default value:** "ERROR"
When using `ref` or `relref` to resolve page links and a link cannot resolved, it will be logged with this log level. Valid values are `ERROR` (default) or `WARNING`. Any `ERROR` will fail the build (`exit -1`).
### refLinksNotFoundURL
URL to be used as a placeholder when a page reference cannot be found in `ref` or `relref`. Is used as-is.
Removes [non-spacing marks](https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/category/Mn) from [composite characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precomposed_character) in content paths.
Timeout for generating page contents, specified as a [duration](https://pkg.go.dev/time#Duration) or in milliseconds. *Note:* this is used to bail out of recursive content generation. You might need to raise this limit if your pages are slow to generate (e.g., because they require large image processing or depend on remote contents).
The time zone (or location), e.g. `Europe/Oslo`, used to parse front matter dates without such information and in the [`time` function](/functions/time/). The list of valid values may be system dependent, but should include `UTC`, `Local`, and any location in the [IANA Time Zone database](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones).
: When to use the cached resources in `/resources/_gen` for PostCSS and ToCSS. Valid values are `never`, `always` and `fallback`. The last value means that the cache will be tried if PostCSS/extended version is not available.
: 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](/hugo-pipes/postprocess/#css-purging-with-postcss). If you're only using this for the production build, you should consider placing it below [config/production](/getting-started/configuration/#configuration-directory). 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 regular `hugo` build.
**Note** that the prime use case for this is purging of unused CSS; it is build for speed and there may be false positives (e.g. elements that isn't really a HTML element).
: Turn off writing a `jsconfig.json` into your `/assets` folder with mapping of imports from running [js.Build](https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/js). This file is intended to help with intellisense/navigation inside code editors such as [VS Code](https://code.visualstudio.com/). Note that if you do not use `js.Build`, no file will be written.
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](https://docs.netlify.com/routing/headers/#syntax-for-the-netlify-configuration-file) with slightly more powerful [Glob matching](https://github.com/gobwas/glob):
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](https://docs.netlify.com/routing/redirects/rewrites-proxies/), which is what you want in SPA situations, e.g:
{{<new-in"0.76.0">}} 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.
Set `titleCaseStyle` to specify the title style used by the [title](/functions/title/) template function and the automatic section titles in Hugo. It defaults to [AP Stylebook](https://www.apstylebook.com/) 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:
1.`./config.toml`
2.`./config.yaml`
3.`./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][]:
{{<code-togglefile="config">}}
baseURL: "https://yoursite.example.com/"
title: "My Hugo Site"
permalinks:
posts: /:year/:month/:title/
params:
Subtitle: "Hugo is Absurdly Fast!"
AuthorName: "Jon Doe"
GitHubUser: "spf13"
ListOfFoo:
- "foo1"
- "foo2"
SidebarRecentLimit: 5
{{</code-toggle>}}
## 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](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoDocs/blob/master/netlify.toml) for an example.
{{% note "Setting Environment Variables" %}}
Names must be prefixed with `HUGO_` and the configuration key must be set in uppercase when setting operating system environment variables.
To set config params, prefix the name with `HUGO_PARAMS_`
{{<new-in"0.79.0">}} 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](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2821043/allowed-characters-in-linux-environment-variable-names#:~:text=So%20names%20may%20contain%20any,not%20begin%20with%20a%20digit.) delimiter.
To exclude specific files from the `content` and `data` directories when rendering your site, set `ignoreFiles` to one or more regular expressions to match against the absolute file path.
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` 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.
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 date `2018-02-22`. Also, if `slug` is not set, `mypage` will be used as the value for `.Slug`.
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 or `enableGitInfo = 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.
: This is the value of the `cacheDir` config option if set (can also be set via OS env variable `HUGO_CACHEDIR`). It will fall back to `/opt/build/cache/hugo_cache/` on Netlify, or a `hugo_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](https://github.com/bep/hugo-sass-test/blob/6c3960a8f4b90e8938228688bc49bdcdd6b2d99e/.circleci/config.yml).
`: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).
