hugo/docs/content/en/content-management/menus.md

title	linkTitle	description	categories	keywords	menu	toc	weight	aliases
Menus	Menus	Hugo has a simple yet powerful menu system.	content management	menus	docs parent weight content-management 190	true	190	/extras/menus/

{{% note "Lazy Blogger"%}} If all you want is a simple menu for your sections, see the "Section Menu for Lazy Bloggers" in Menu Templates. {{% /note %}}

You can do this:

• Place content in one or many menus
• Handle nested menus with unlimited depth
• Create menu entries without being attached to any content
• Distinguish active element (and active branch)

What is a Menu in Hugo?

A menu is a named array of menu entries accessible by name via the .Site.Menus site variable. For example, you can access your site's main menu via .Site.Menus.main.

{{% note "Menus on Multilingual Sites" %}} If you make use of the multilingual feature, you can define language-independent menus. {{% /note %}}

See the Menu Entry Properties for all the variables and functions related to a menu entry.

Add content to menus

Hugo allows you to add content to a menu via the content's front matter.

Simple

If all you need to do is add an entry to a menu, the simple form works well.

A Single Menu

{{< code-toggle >}} menu: "main" {{< /code-toggle >}}

Multiple Menus

{{< code-toggle >}} menu: ["main", "footer"] {{< /code-toggle >}}

Advanced

{{< code-toggle >}} menu: docs: parent: 'extras' weight: 20 {{< /code-toggle >}}

Add Non-content Entries to a Menu

You can also add entries to menus that aren’t attached to a piece of content. This takes place in your Hugo project's config file (see Menu Entry Properties for full details of available variables).

Here’s an example snippet pulled from a configuration file:

{{< code-toggle file="config" >}} menu.main name = "about hugo" pre = "" weight = -110 identifier = "about" url = "/about/" menu.main name = "getting started" pre = "" post = "New!" weight = -100 url = "/getting-started/" {{< /code-toggle >}}

{{% note %}} The URLs must be relative to the context root. If the baseURL is https://example.com/mysite/, then the URLs in the menu must not include the context root mysite. Using an absolute URL will override the baseURL. If the value used for URL in the above example is https://subdomain.example.com/, the output will be https://subdomain.example.com. {{% /note %}}

Nesting

All nesting of content is done via the parent field.

The parent of an entry should be the identifier of another entry. The identifier should be unique (within a menu).

The following order is used to determine an Identifier:

.Name > .LinkTitle > .Title

This means that .Title will be used unless .LinkTitle is present, etc. In practice, .Name and .Identifier are only used to structure relationships and therefore never displayed.

In this example, the top level of the menu is defined in your site config file. All content entries are attached to one of these entries via the .Parent field.

Params

You can also add user-defined content to menu items via the params field.

A common use case is to define a custom param to add a css class to a specific menu item.

{{< code-toggle file="config" >}} menu.main name = "about hugo" pre = "" weight = -110 identifier = "about" url = "/about/" [menu.main.params] class = "highlight-menu-item" {{</ code-toggle >}}

Render Menus

See Menu Templates for information on how to render your site menus within your templates.