Configuration

Hugo reads its configuration from hugo.yaml in the root of your Hugo site. The config file is where you can configure all aspects of your site. Check out the config file for this site exampleSite/hugo.yaml on GitHub to get a comprehensive idea of available settings and best practices.

Navigation

Menu

Top right menu is defined under the menu.main section in the config file:

menu:
  main:
    - name: Documentation
      pageRef: /docs
      weight: 1
    - name: Blog
      pageRef: /blog
      weight: 2
    - name: About
      pageRef: /about
      weight: 3
    - name: Search
      weight: 4
      params:
        type: search
    - name: GitHub
      weight: 5
      url: "https://github.com/imfing/hextra"
      params:
        icon: github

There are different types of menu items:

1. Link to a page in the site with pageRef

   - name: Documentation
     pageRef: /docs
2. Link to an external URL with url

   - name: GitHub
     url: "https://github.com"
3. Search bar with type: search

   - name: Search
     params:
       type: search
4. Icon

   - name: GitHub
     params:
       icon: github

These menu items can be sorted by setting the weight parameter.

Nested Menus

You can create dropdown menus by defining child menu items. Child menus appear when clicking on the parent menu item.

menu:
  main:
    - identifier: sdk
      name: SDK
    - identifier: python
      name: Python ↗
      url: https://python.org
      parent: sdk
    - identifier: go
      name: Go
      url: https://go.dev
      parent: sdk

Child menu items need to specify the parent parameter with the parent’s identifier value.

Logo and Title

To modify the default logo, edit hugo.yaml and add the path to your logo file under static directory. Optionally, you can change the link that users are redirected to when clicking on your logo, as well as set the width & height of the logo in pixels.

params:
  navbar:
    displayTitle: true
    displayLogo: true
    logo:
      path: images/logo.svg
      dark: images/logo-dark.svg
      link: /
      width: 40
      height: 20

Sidebar

Main Sidebar

For the main sidebar, it is automatically generated from the structure of the content directory. See the Organize Files page for more details.

To exclude a single page from the left sidebar, set the sidebar.exclude parameter in the front matter of the page:

---
title: Configuration
sidebar:
  exclude: true
---

Extra Links

Sidebar extra links are defined under the menu.sidebar section in the config file:

menu:
  sidebar:
    - name: More
      params:
        type: separator
      weight: 1
    - name: "About"
      pageRef: "/about"
      weight: 2
    - name: "Hugo Docs ↗"
      url: "https://gohugo.io/documentation/"
      weight: 3

Right Sidebar

Table of Contents

Table of contents is automatically generated from the headings in the content file. It can be disabled by setting toc: false in the front matter of the page.

---
title: Configuration
toc: false
---

Page Edit Link

To configure the page edit link, we can set the params.editURL.base parameter in the config file:

params:
  editURL:
    enable: true
    base: "https://github.com/your-username/your-repo/edit/main"

The edit links will be automatically generated for each page based on the provided url as root directory. If you want to set edit link for a specific page, you can set the editURL parameter in the front matter of the page:

---
title: Configuration
editURL: "https://example.com/edit/this/page"
---

Footer

Copyright

To modify the copyright text displayed in your website’s footer, you’ll need to create a file named i18n/en.yaml. In this file, specify your new copyright text as shown below:

copyright: "© 2024 YOUR TEXT HERE"

For your reference, an example i18n/en.yaml file can be found in the GitHub repository. Additionally, you could use Markdown format in the copyright text.

Others

Favicon

To customize the favicon for your site, place icon files under the static folder to override the default favicons from the theme:

Basic Setup

At minimum, include favicon.svg in your static folder. This will be used as the default favicon for your site.

You can create an adaptive SVG favicon that responds to system theme preferences by using CSS media queries within the SVG itself, following the approach described in Building an Adaptive Favicon.

Dark Mode Support

For enhanced dark mode support, add favicon-dark.svg to your static folder alongside favicon.svg. When both files are present, Hextra will automatically:

• Use favicon.svg for light mode or when no theme preference is detected
• Switch to favicon-dark.svg when the user’s system is set to dark mode
• Respect the system’s prefers-color-scheme setting for automatic switching

The dark mode favicon switching works across all modern browsers, including Firefox, and provides a seamless experience that matches your site’s theme.

Additional Formats

While favicon.ico is generally for older browsers, modern browsers support SVG favicons which are preferred for their scalability and small file size. Use tools like favicon.io or favycon to generate additional favicon formats if needed.

Theme Configuration

Use the theme setting to configure the default theme mode and toggle button, allowing visitors to switch between light or dark mode.

params:
  theme:
    # light | dark | system
    default: system
    displayToggle: true

Options for theme.default:

• light - always use light mode
• dark - always use dark mode
• system - sync with the operating system setting (default)

The theme.displayToggle parameter allows you to display a toggle button for changing themes. When set to true, visitors can switch between light or dark mode, overriding the default setting.

Page Last Modification

The date of the page’s last modification can be displayed by enabling the params.displayUpdatedDate flag. To use Git commit date as the source, enable also the enableGitInfo flag.

To customize the date format, set the params.dateFormat parameter. Its layout matches Hugo’s time.Format.

# Parse Git commit
enableGitInfo: true

params:
  # Display the last modification date
  displayUpdatedDate: true
  dateFormat: "January 2, 2006"

Tags

To display page tags, set following flags in the config file:

params:
  blog:
    list:
      displayTags: true
  toc:
    displayTags: true

Page Width

The width of the page can be customized by the params.page.width parameter in the config file:

params:
  page:
    # full (100%), wide (90rem), normal (1280px)
    width: wide

There are three available options: full, wide, and normal. By default, the page width is set to normal.

Similarly, the width of the navbar and footer can be customized by the params.navbar.width and params.footer.width parameters.

FlexSearch Index

Full-text search powered by FlexSearch is enabled by default. To customize the search index, set the params.search.flexsearch.index parameter in the config file:

params:
  # Search
  search:
    enable: true
    type: flexsearch

    flexsearch:
      # index page by: content | summary | heading | title
      index: content

Options for flexsearch.index:

• content - full content of the page (default)
• summary - summary of the page, see Hugo Content Summaries for more details
• heading - level 1 and level 2 headings
• title - only include the page title

To customize the search tokenize, set the params.search.flexsearch.tokenize parameter in the config file:

params:
  search:
    # ...
    flexsearch:
      # full | forward | reverse | strict
      tokenize: forward

Options for flexsearch.tokenize:

• strict - index whole words
• forward - incrementally index words in forward direction
• reverse - incrementally index words in both directions
• full - index every possible combination

To exclude a page from the FlexSearch search index, set the excludeSearch: true in the front matter of the page:

---
title: Configuration
excludeSearch: true
---

Google Analytics

To enable Google Analytics, set services.googleAnalytics.ID flag in hugo.yaml:

services:
  googleAnalytics:
    ID: G-MEASUREMENT_ID

Google Search Index

To block Google Search from indexing a page, set noindex to true in your page frontmatter:

title: Configuration (archive version)
params:
  noindex: true

To exclude an entire directory, use the cascade key in the parent _index.md file.

LLMS.txt Support

To enable llms.txt output format for your site, which provides a structured text outline for large language models and AI agents, add the llms output format to your site’s hugo.yaml:

outputs:
- home: [html]
+ home: [html, llms]
  page: [html]
  section: [html, rss]

This will generate an llms.txt file at your site’s root containing:

• Site title and description
• Hierarchical listing of all sections and pages
• Page summaries and publication dates
• Direct links to all content

The llms.txt file is automatically generated from your content structure and makes your site more accessible to AI tools and language models for context and reference.

Open Graph

To add Open Graph metadata to a page, add values in the frontmatter params.

As a page can have multiple image and video tags, place their values in an array. Other Open Graph properties can have only one value. For example, this page has an og:image tag (which configures an image to preview on social shares) and an og:audio tag.

title: "Configuration"
params:
  images:
    - "/img/config-image.jpg"
  audio: "config-talk.mp3"