Hugo cheatsheet

What you will find here

Every time I learn something useful about hugo, and I want to remember it, I add another paragraph here.

Oh, you never heard about Hugo ? go visit https://gohugo.io !! 💨

Howtos ToC

Change depth of ToC

https://github.com/alex-shpak/hugo-book/issues/52#issuecomment-599609898

#... A lot of configuration before

# --- here the top Level configuration
#     element 'markdown' is the one we
#     use to configure ToC level
markup:
  # just to set ToC depth
  tableOfContents:
    endLevel: 4
    startLevel: 2
    # ordered: false
#... A lot of confiugration after

Hugo, dates, and Time

Well hugo has a lot of work and no time to get some date with huguette…

Everything about Dates and time in hugo projects’ here.

Generating a hugo date string

I’ll show you how to do that using a docker container, so that you can run this operation anywhere you can run a docker container.

I know of two formats that are going to be accepted as valid by hugo as a date (in the frontmatter) for a post :


docker pull debian

docker run -itd --restart unless-stopped --name deb_util debian bash


# export DATE_CMD_WITH_TIMEZONE_SHIFT="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z'"
# export DATE_CMD_WITHOUT_TIMEZONE="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%'"

export DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z'"

export DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z' -d '+1 days'"

docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW}"

docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY}"

Return to the Future Hugo

In the frontmatter of a hugo post, you can set two different date times :

the post date : that’s the date the user will see as date the post was written
the post publishDate : that’s a very interesting one, just test the example below, you’ll understand!

First, generate two datetime string, the current date time, and the current datetime plus exactly 24 hours :


docker pull debian

docker run -itd --restart unless-stopped --name deb_util debian bash


export DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z'"

export DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY="date -u +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%:z' -d '+1 days'"

docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW}"

docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY}"

export DATE_NOW=$(docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW}" | tr -d "\n\r")

export DATE_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY=$(docker exec -it deb_util bash -c "${DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY}" | tr -d "\n\r")

echo "# ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- #"
echo ""
echo "DATE_NOW=[${DATE_NOW}]"
echo ""
echo "DATE_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY=[${DATE_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY}]"
echo "# ----------------- ----------------- ----------------- #"

Now create a new post in your hugo project, and in the front matter set :

The date, to the value you generated and stored into the DATE_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY environment variable above.
The publishDate, to the value you generated and stored into the DATE_NOW environment variable above.

In your new post, the front matter will look like :

---
title: "My Awesome new hugo post!"
date: 2022-06-19T00:21:05+00:00
publishDate: 2022-06-20T00:21:05+00:00
draft: false
github_link: "https://github.com/pokusio/npx-hugo-gmented"
author: "H.P. Lovecraft"
tags:
  - Awesome Books
  - incredible writer
  - american
  - mystical
  - lovecraft
  - mythology
image: /images/posts/hplovecraft/callofcthulhu.svg
description: ""
toc:
---

Finally, for both new posts, in your rendered HTML layout, (for example a single.html layout for the hugo content type of your post), you must at least render the {{ .Params.date.Format "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }} field, for example next to post author, like this :

<div class="text-center">
  {{ .Params.author }}
  <small>|</small>
  {{ .Params.date.Format "Monday, Jan 2, 2006" }}
</div>

Now run your hugo server locally :

Okay, you have a new post,

your new post has DATE_CMD_WITH_TZ_NOW_PLUS_ONE_DAY as publishing date

your new post is dated in the future, but yet is already published :

the publishDate tells hugo when to actually publish the article

Every time the hugo build is executed, hugo will compare the publishDate and the current date time, and if the publishDate is is the past, hugo will actually build the post.

When you do not set the publishDate, hugo will default its value, to the value of the date in the front matter.

This means a hugo post in the future basivcally will not be built until current system date time is beyond in time