Deploy a Hugo site

Hugo is a tool for generating static sites, written in Go. It's incredibly fast and has great high-level, flexible primitives for managing your content using Markdown and JSON.

In this guide, you'll create a new Hugo application and deploy it using Cloudflare Pages. We'll be the hugo CLI to create a new Hugo site.

​Installing Hugo

First, install the Hugo CLI, using the specific instructions for your operating system below:

​Linux

Your Linux distro's package manager may include Hugo. If this is the case, you can install it directly using your distro's package manager -- for instance, in Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install hugo

If your package manager doesn't include Hugo or you'd like to download a release directly, see the "Manual" section below.

​Homebrew (macOS)

If you use the package manager HomebrewOpen external link, you can use brew install to install Hugo:

$ brew install hugo

​Windows (Chocolatey)

If you use the package manager ChocolateyOpen external link, you can use choco install to install Hugo:

$ choco install hugo --confirm

​Manual installation

The Hugo GitHub repository contains pre-built versions of the Hugo command-line tool for various operating systems, which can be found on the Releases pageOpen external link.

For more instruction on installing these releases, see Hugo's install guideOpen external link.

​Creating a new project

With Hugo installed, you can create a new project using hugo new:

$ hugo new site my-hugo-site

Hugo sites use themes to customize the look and feel of the statically built HTML site. There are a number of themes available at themes.gohugo.ioOpen external link -- for now, we'll pick the Terminal themeOpen external link and install it:

$ cd my-hugo-site$ git init$ git clone https://github.com/panr/hugo-theme-terminal.git themes/terminal

You should also copy the default configuration provided by the theme into the config.toml file. Take the following information and customize it per your site's needs:

baseurl = "/"languageCode = "en-us"theme = "terminal"paginate = 5
[params]  # dir name of your main content (default is `content/posts`).  # the list of set content will show up on your index page (baseurl).  contentTypeName = "posts"
  # ["orange", "blue", "red", "green", "pink"]  themeColor = "orange"
  # if you set this to 0, only submenu trigger will be visible  showMenuItems = 2
  # show selector to switch language  showLanguageSelector = false
  # set theme to full screen width  fullWidthTheme = false
  # center theme with default width  centerTheme = false
  # set a custom favicon (default is a `themeColor` square)  # favicon = "favicon.ico"
  # set post to show the last updated  # If you use git, you can set `enableGitInfo` to `true` and then post will automatically get the last updated  showLastUpdated = false  # Provide a string as a prefix for the last update date. By default, it looks like this: 2020-xx-xx [Updated: 2020-xx-xx] :: Author  # updatedDatePrefix = "Updated"
  # set all headings to their default size (depending on browser settings)  # it's set to `true` by default  # oneHeadingSize = false
[params.twitter]  # set Twitter handles for Twitter cards  # see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/optimize-with-cards/guides/getting-started#card-and-content-attribution  # do not include @  creator = ""  site = ""
[languages]  [languages.en]    languageName = "English"    title = "Terminal"    subtitle = "A simple, retro theme for Hugo"    owner = ""    keywords = ""    copyright = ""    menuMore = "Show more"    readMore = "Read more"    readOtherPosts = "Read other posts"    missingContentMessage = "Page not found..."    missingBackButtonLabel = "Back to home page"
    [languages.en.params.logo]      logoText = "Terminal"      logoHomeLink = "/"
    [languages.en.menu]      [[languages.en.menu.main]]        identifier = "about"        name = "About"        url = "/about"      [[languages.en.menu.main]]        identifier = "showcase"        name = "Showcase"        url = "/showcase"

​Creating a post

Finally, you can create a new post to give your Hugo site some initial content. Run the hugo new command to generate a new post:

$ hugo new posts/hello-world.md

Inside of hello-world.md, you can add some initial content to flesh out your post. Make sure to remove the draft line in your post's frontmatter when you're ready to publish the post: any posts with draft: true set will be skipped by Hugo's build process.

​Creating a GitHub repository

Create a new GitHub repository by visiting repo.newOpen external link. Once you've created a new repository, you can push your local application to GitHub:

$ git remote add origin https://github.com/yourgithubusername/githubrepo$ git branch -M main$ git push -u origin main

​Deploying with Cloudflare Pages

You can deploy your site to Cloudflare Pages by going to the dashboard, and creating a new site. Select your new GitHub repository that you created above, and in the configuration section, provide the following information:

Once you've configured your site, you can begin your first deploy. You should see Cloudflare Pages installing hugo, your project dependencies, and building your site, before deploying it.

Once you've deployed your site, you'll receive a unique subdomain for your project on pages.dev. Every time you commit new code to your Hugo site, Cloudflare Pages will automatically rebuild your project and deploy it. You'll also get access to preview deployments on new pull requests, so you can preview how changes look to your site before deploying them to production.

​Using a specific Hugo version

You can set the environment variable HUGO_VERSION under Settings to use a specific version of Hugo.

For example, HUGO_VERSION: 0.81.0

​Learn more

Congrats, you've deployed your Hugo site on Cloudflare Pages! To learn more about what you can do with the platform, check out our How-To section.