All contributions to Hugo are welcome. Whether you want to scratch an itch or simply contribute to the project, feel free to pick something from the roadmap or contact spf13 about what may make sense to do next.

You should fork the project and make your changes. We encourage pull requests to discuss code changes.

When you’re ready to create a pull request, be sure to:

Have test cases for the new code. If you have questions about how to do it, please ask in your pull request.
Run go fmt.
Squash your commits into a single commit. git rebase -i. It’s okay to force update your pull request.
Make sure go test ./... passes, and go build completes. Our Travis CI loop will catch most things that are missing. The exception: Windows. We run on Windows from time to time, but if you have access, please check on a Windows machine too.

Contribution Overview

We wrote a detailed guide for newcomers that guides you step by step to your first contribution. If you are more experienced, follow the guide below.

Building from source

Clone locally (for contributors):

git clone https://github.com/spf13/hugo
cd hugo
go get

Because Go expects all of your libraries to be found in either $GOROOT or $GOPATH, it’s helpful to symlink the project to one of the following paths:

ln -s /path/to/your/hugo $GOPATH/src/github.com/spf13/hugo
ln -s /path/to/your/hugo $GOROOT/src/pkg/github.com/spf13/hugo

Running Hugo

cd /path/to/hugo
go install github.com/spf13/hugo/hugo
go run main.go

Building Hugo

cd /path/to/hugo
go build -o hugo main.go
mv hugo /usr/local/bin/

Showcase additions

You got your new website running and it’s powered by Hugo? Great. You can add your website with a few steps to the showcase.

First, make sure that you created a fork of Hugo on Github and cloned your fork on your local computer. Next, create a separate branch for your additions:

# You can choose a different descriptive branch name if you like
git checkout -b showcase-addition

Let’s create a new document that contains some metadata of your homepage. Replace example in the following examples with something unique like the name of your website. Inside the terminal enter the following commands:

cd docs
hugo new showcase/example.md

You should find the new file at content/showcase/example.md. Open it in an editor. The file should contain a frontmatter with predefined variables like below:

---
date: 2016-02-12T21:01:18+01:00
description: ""
license: ""
licenseLink: ""
sitelink: http://spf13.com/
sourceLink: https://github.com/spf13/spf13.com
tags:
- personal
- blog
thumbnail: /img/spf13-tn.jpg
title: example
---

Add at least values for sitelink, title, description and a path for thumbnail.

Furthermore, we need to create the thumbnail of your website. It’s important that the thumbnail has the required dimensions of 600px by 400px. Give your thumbnail a name like example-tn.png. Save it under docs/static/img/.

Check a last time that everything works as expected. Start Hugo’s built-in server in order to inspect your local copy of the showcase in the browser:

hugo server

If everything looks fine, we are ready to commit your additions. For the sake of best practices, please make sure that your commit follows our code contribution guideline.

git commit -m"docs: Add example.com to the showcase"

Last but not least, we’re ready to create a pull request.

Don’t forget to accept the contributor license agreement. Click on the yellow badge in the automatically added comment in the pull request.