hugo/docs/content/en/content-management/front-matter.md

title	description	categories	keywords	menu	weight	toc	aliases
Front matter	Hugo allows you to add front matter in yaml, toml, or json to your content files.	content management	front matter yaml toml json metadata archetypes	docs parent weight content-management 60	60	true	/content/front-matter/

Front matter allows you to keep metadata attached to an instance of a content type---i.e., embedded inside a content file---and is one of the many features that gives Hugo its strength.

{{< youtube Yh2xKRJGff4 >}}

Front matter formats

Hugo supports four formats for front matter, each with their own identifying tokens.

TOML

identified by opening and closing +++.

YAML

identified by opening and closing ---.

JSON

a single JSON object surrounded by '{' and '}', followed by a new line.

ORG

a group of Org mode keywords in the format '#+KEY: VALUE'. Any line that does not start with #+ ends the front matter section. Array values can either be separated into multiple lines (#+KEY: VALUE_1 and #+KEY: VALUE_2) or a whitespace separated list of strings (#+KEY[]: VALUE_1 VALUE_2).

Example

{{< code-toggle >}} title = "spf13-vim 3.0 release and new website" description = "spf13-vim is a cross platform distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim." tags = [ ".vimrc", "plugins", "spf13-vim", "vim" ] date = "2012-04-06" categories = [ "Development", "VIM" ] slug = "spf13-vim-3-0-release-and-new-website" {{< /code-toggle >}}

Front matter variables

Predefined

There are a few predefined variables that Hugo is aware of. See Page Variables for how to call many of these predefined variables in your templates.

aliases

An array of one or more aliases (e.g., old published paths of renamed content) that will be created in the output directory structure . See Aliases for details.

audio

An array of paths to audio files related to the page; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:audio.

cascade

A map of front matter keys whose values are passed down to the page's descendants unless overwritten by self or a closer ancestor's cascade. See Front Matter Cascade for details.

date

The datetime assigned to this page. This is usually fetched from the date field in front matter, but this behavior is configurable.

description

The description for the content.

draft

If true, the content will not be rendered unless the --buildDrafts flag is passed to the hugo command.

expiryDate

The datetime at which the content should no longer be published by Hugo; expired content will not be rendered unless the --buildExpired flag is passed to the hugo command.

headless

If true, sets a leaf bundle to be headless.

images

An array of paths to images related to the page; used by internal templates such as _internal/twitter_cards.html.

isCJKLanguage

If true, Hugo will explicitly treat the content as a CJK language; both .Summary and .WordCount work properly in CJK languages.

keywords

The meta keywords for the content.

layout

The layout Hugo should select from the lookup order when rendering the content. If a type is not specified in the front matter, Hugo will look for the layout of the same name in the layout directory that corresponds with a content's section. See Content Types.

lastmod

The datetime at which the content was last modified.

linkTitle

Used for creating links to content; if set, Hugo defaults to using the linkTitle before the title.

markup

experimental; specify "rst" for reStructuredText (requiresrst2html) or "md" (default) for Markdown.

outputs

Allows you to specify output formats specific to the content. See output formats.

publishDate

If in the future, content will not be rendered unless the --buildFuture flag is passed to hugo.

resources

Used for configuring page bundle resources. See Page Resources.

series

An array of series this page belongs to, as a subset of the series taxonomy; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:see_also.

slug

Overrides the last segment of the URL path. Not applicable to section pages. See URL Management for details.

summary

Text used when providing a summary of the article in the .Summary page variable; details available in the content-summaries section.

title

The title for the content.

type

The type of the content; this value will be automatically derived from the directory (i.e., the section) if not specified in front matter.

url

Overrides the entire URL path. Applicable to regular pages and section pages. See URL Management for details.

videos

An array of paths to videos related to the page; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:video.

weight

used for ordering your content in lists. Lower weight gets higher precedence. So content with lower weight will come first. If set, weights should be non-zero, as 0 is interpreted as an unset weight.

{{% note %}} If neither slug nor url is present and permalinks are not configured otherwise in your site configuration file, Hugo will use the file name of your content to create the output URL. See Content Organization for an explanation of paths in Hugo and URL Management for ways to customize Hugo's default behaviors. {{% /note %}}

User-defined

You can add fields to your front matter arbitrarily to meet your needs. These user-defined key-values are placed into a single .Params variable for use in your templates.

The following fields can be accessed via .Params.include_toc and .Params.show_comments, respectively. The Variables section provides more information on using Hugo's page- and site-level variables in your templates.

{{< code-toggle >}} include_toc: true show_comments: false {{</ code-toggle >}}

Front matter cascade

Any node or section can pass down to descendants a set of front matter values as long as defined underneath the reserved cascade front matter key.

Target specific pages

The cascade block can be a slice with a optional _target keyword, allowing for multiple cascade values targeting different page sets.

{{< code-toggle >}} title ="Blog" cascade background = "yosemite.jpg" [cascade._target] path="/blog/**" lang="en" kind="page" cascade background = "goldenbridge.jpg" [cascade._target] kind="section" {{</ code-toggle >}}

Keywords available for _target:

path

A Glob pattern matching the content path below /content. Expects Unix-styled slashes. Note that this is the virtual path, so it starts at the mount root. The matching supports double-asterisks so you can match for patterns like /blog/*/** to match anything from the third level and down.

kind

A Glob pattern matching the Page's Kind(s), e.g. "{home,section}".

lang

A Glob pattern matching the Page's language, e.g. "{en,sv}".

environment

A Glob pattern matching the build environment, e.g. "{production,development}"

Any of the above can be omitted.

{{% note %}} When making a site that supports multiple languages, defining a [[cascade]] is recommended to be done in Site Config to prevent duplication.

If you instead define a [[cascade]] in front matter for multiple languages, an content/XX/foo/_index.md file needs to be made on a per-language basis, with XX the glob pattern matching the Page's language. In this case, the lang keyword is ignored. {{% /note %}}

Example

In content/blog/_index.md

{{< code-toggle >}} title: Blog cascade: banner: images/typewriter.jpg {{</ code-toggle >}}

With the above example the Blog section page and its descendants will return images/typewriter.jpg when .Params.banner is invoked unless:

• Said descendant has its own banner value set
• Or a closer ancestor node has its own cascade.banner value set.

Order content through front matter

You can assign content-specific weight in the front matter of your content. These values are especially useful for ordering in list views. You can use weight for ordering of content and the convention of <TAXONOMY>_weight for ordering content within a taxonomy. See Ordering and Grouping Hugo Lists to see how weight can be used to organize your content in list views.

Override global markdown configuration

It's possible to set some options for Markdown rendering in a content's front matter as an override to the rendering options set in your project configuration.

Front matter format specs

• TOML Spec
• YAML Spec
• JSON Spec