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HUGO Variables

Rob Wiederstein | 2021-02-19
Categories: hugo go

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Hugo is the static web site generator paired with blogdown.
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Summary

Inspecting a hugo website will reveal templates dependent on variables. You have to have an understanding of what variables are available and under what circumstances. Careful reading of hugo documentation is helpful, but here are a few tips.

Table of Contents

hugo has lots of different kinds of variables but we’ll focus on just three here: (1) “built-in” site variables, (2) defined global variables in the config file and (3) page variables.

Site Variables List

Site-level variables are built into hugo’s “core” and are defined in the configuration file. Any variable that begins with .Site is a site-level variable. Common examples include:Site.Author, .Site.BaseURL, and .Site.Title. To see the configuration settings for hugo run the following code in the terminal:

hugo config

Reference to a site variable might look like
<p>{{ .Site.Title }}</p>.

.Site.Params Variable

The .Site.Params variable is a container that holds all of the values from the params section of your configuration file. For example, www.robwiederstein.org holds the parameters:

params:
  author: Rob Wiederstein
  MathJaxCDN: //cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs
  MathJaxVersion: 2.7.5
  description: A website about data, analysis, and public policy.
  favicon: favicon.ico

Reference to the above author would look like {{ .Site.Params.author }} and return “Rob Wiederstein”.

Page Variables

Page-level variables are either (1) defined in a content files front matter, (2) derived from the content’s file location, or (3) extracted from the content body itself.

Here’s some code that is the front matter of an .Rmd post.

#example front matter
title: Lost Cargo in Wisconsin Shipwrecks
author: Rob Wiederstein
date: '2021-03-20'
slug: lost-cargo-in-wisconsin-shipwrecks
categories:
  - R
tags:
  - wordcloud

Page-level variables are only accessible in lower case like .Params.tags.

Conclusion

Variables are the building blocks for templates. Understanding what’s available and how to define a variable means you can use it to render webpages. Hugo’s documentation on variables can be found here.