In Hugo 0.110.0 we changed the default configuration base file name to `hugo`, e.g. `hugo.toml`. We will still look for `config.toml` etc., but we recommend you eventually rename it (but you need to wait if you want to support older Hugo versions). The main reason we're doing this is to make it easier for code editors and build tools to identify this as a Hugo configuration file and project.
In addition to using a single site configuration 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:
Considering the structure above, when running `hugo --environment staging`, Hugo will use every setting from `config/_default` and merge `staging`'s on top of those.
Let's take an example to understand this better. Let's say you are using Google Analytics for your website. This requires you to specify `googleAnalytics = "G-XXXXXXXX"` in `hugo.toml`. Now consider the following scenario:
1. In `_default/hugo.toml` you don't need to mention `googleAnalytics` parameter at all. This ensures that no Google Analytics code is loaded in your development server i.e. when you run `hugo server`. This works since, by default Hugo sets `Environment=development` when you run `hugo server` which uses the configuration files from `_default` folder
You don't need to mention all other parameters like `title`, `baseURL`, `theme` etc. again in this configuration file. You need to mention only those parameters which are different or new for the production environment. This is due to the fact that Hugo is going to __merge__ this on top of `_default/hugo.toml`. Now when you run `hugo` (build command), by default hugo sets `Environment=production`, so the `G-PPPPPPPP` analytics code will be there in your production website
Now you need to tell Hugo that you are using the staging environment. So your build command should be `hugo --environment staging` which will load the `G-SSSSSSSS` analytics code in your staging website
Pass down default configuration values (front matter) to pages in the content tree. The options in site configuration is the same as in page front matter, see [Front Matter Cascade](/content-management/front-matter#front-matter-cascade).
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.
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.
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). This value is used to populate:
- The `<language>` element in the internal [RSS template](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/tpl/tplimpl/embedded/templates/_default/rss.xml)
- The `lang` attribute of the `<html>` element in the internal [alias template](https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/blob/master/tpl/tplimpl/embedded/templates/alias.html)
When using `ref` or `relref` to resolve page links and a link cannot be resolved, it will be logged with this log level. Valid values are `ERROR` (default) or `WARNING`. Any `ERROR` will fail the build (`exit -1`).
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 seconds. *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 enabled, creates a `hugo_stats.json` file in the root of your project. This file contains arrays of the `class` attributes, `id` attributes, and tags of every HTML element within your published site. Use this file as data source when [removing unused CSS] from your site. This process is also known as pruning, purging, or tree shaking.
With v0.115.0 and earlier this feature was enabled by setting `writeStats` to `true`. Although still functional, the `writeStats` key will be deprecated in a future release.
Built for speed, there may be "false positive" detections (e.g., HTML elements that are not HTML elements) while parsing the published site. These "false positives" are infrequent and inconsequential.
{{% /note %}}
Due to the nature of partial server builds, new HTML entities are added while the server is running, but old values will not be removed until you restart the server or run a regular `hugo` build.
: Turn off writing a `jsconfig.json` into your `/assets` folder with mapping of imports from running [js.Build](/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.
useResourceCacheWhen
: 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.
The `build.cachebusters` configuration option was added to support development using Tailwind 3.x's JIT compiler where a `build` configuration may look like this:
<!-- TODO (jmm) writeStats => build.buildStats -->
Some key points in the above are `writeStats = true`, which writes a `hugo_stats.json` file on each build with HTML classes etc. that's used in the rendered output. Changes to this file will trigger a rebuild of the `styles.css` file. You also need to add `hugo_stats.json` to Hugo's server watcher. See [Hugo Starter Tailwind Basic](https://github.com/bep/hugo-starter-tailwind-basic) for a running example.
source
: A regexp matching file(s) relative to one of the virtual component directories in Hugo, typically `assets/...`.
target
: A regexp matching the keys in the resource cache that should be expired when `source` changes. You can use the matching regexp groups from `source` in the expression, e.g. `$1`.
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):
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:
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 behavior, but this is inline with how Netlify does it.
Hugo will, by default, render all 404 errors when running `hugo server` with the `404.html` template. Note that if you have already added one or more redirects to your [server configuration](#configure-server), you need to add the 404 redirect explicitly, e.g:
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:
In your configuration 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.
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]:
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.
If you are using snake_cased variable names, the above will not work. 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.
**Note:** This works, but we recommend you use the newer and more powerful [includeFiles and excludeFiles](/hugo-modules/configuration/#module-configuration-mounts) mount options.
To exclude specific files from the `content`, `data`, and `i18n` 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 `hugo.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 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`.
: Fetches the date from the content file's file name. 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 file name, then it will look in front matter parameters `date`, `publishDate` and lastly `lastmod`.
: 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 configuration.
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.
: 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.
: 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).
This is the directory where Hugo by default will store its file caches. See [Configure File Caches](#configure-file-caches).
This can be set using the `cacheDir` config option or via the OS env variable `HUGO_CACHEDIR`.
If this is not set, Hugo will use, in order of preference:
1. If running on Netlify: `/opt/build/cache/hugo_cache/`. 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).
1. In a `hugo_cache` directory below the OS user cache directory as defined by Go's [os.UserCacheDir](https://pkg.go.dev/os#UserCacheDir). On Unix systems, this is `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME` as specified by [basedir-spec-latest](https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html) if non-empty, else `$HOME/.config`. On MacOS, this is `$HOME/Library/Application Support`. On Windows, this is`%AppData%`. On Plan 9, this is `$home/lib`. {{<new-in"0.116.0">}}
1. In a `hugo_cache_$USER` directory below the OS temp dir.
If you want to know the current value of `cacheDir`, you can run `hugo config`, e.g: `hugo config | grep cachedir`.
