hugo/docs/content/overview/configuration.md

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/doc/configuration/	2013-07-01	Configuration	main parent getting started	/overview/source-directory	true	/overview/usage	Configuring Hugo	40

The directory structure and templates provide the majority of the configuration for a site. In fact, a config file isn't even needed for many websites since the defaults follow commonly used patterns.

Hugo expects to find the config file in the root of the source directory and will look there first for a config.toml file. If none is present, it will then look for a config.yaml file, followed by a config.json file.

The config file is a site-wide config. The config file provides directions to hugo on how to build the site as well as site-wide parameters and menus.

Examples

The following is an example of a typical yaml config file:

---
baseurl: "http://yoursite.example.com/"
...

The following is an example of a toml config file with some of the default values. Values under [params] will populate the .Site.Params variable for use in templates:

contentdir = "content"
layoutdir = "layouts"
publishdir = "public"
builddrafts = false
baseurl = "http://yoursite.example.com/"
canonifyurls = true

[indexes]
  category = "categories"
  tag = "tags"
   
[params]
  description = "Tesla's Awesome Hugo Site"
  author = "Nikola Tesla"

Here is a yaml configuration file which sets a few more options

---
baseurl: "http://yoursite.example.com/"
title: "Yoyodyne Widget Blogging"
footnotereturnlinkcontents: "↩"
permalinks:
  post: /:year/:month/:title/
params:
  Subtitle: "Spinning the cogs in the widgets"
  AuthorName: "John Doe"
  GitHubUser: "spf13"
  ListOfFoo:
    - "foo1"
    - "foo2"
  SidebarRecentLimit: 5
...

Configure Blackfriday rendering

Blackfriday is the Markdown rendering engine used in Hugo. The Blackfriday configuration in Hugo is mostly a set of sane defaults that should fit most use cases.

But Hugo does expose some options -- in the table below matched with the corresponding flag in the Blackfriday source:

Flag	Default	Blackfriday flag	Purpose
angledQuotes	false	HTML_SMARTYPANTS_ANGLED_QUOTES	Enable angled double quotes (« »)
plainIdAnchors	false	FootnoteAnchorPrefix and HeaderIDSuffix	If true, then header and footnote IDs are generated without the document ID (so, #my-header instead of #my-header:bec3ed8ba720b9073ab75abcf3ba5d97)

Note that these flags must be grouped under the blackfriday key and can be set on both site and page level. If set on page, it will override the site setting.

blackfriday:
  angledQuotes = true
  plainIdAnchors = true

Notes

Config changes do not reflect with Live Reload.

Please restart hugo server --watch whenever you make a config change.