Hugo makes a set of values available to the templates. Go templates are context based. The following are available in the context for the templates.
Page Variables
The following is a list of most of the accessible variables which can be defined for a piece of content. Many of these will be defined in the front matter, content or derived from file location.
See also: Scratch for page-scoped writable variables.
.Content The content itself, defined below the front matter.
.Data The data specific to this type of page.
.Date The date the page is associated with.
.Description The description for the page.
.Draft A boolean, true if the content is marked as a draft in the front matter.
.ExpiryDate The date where the content is scheduled to expire on.
.FuzzyWordCount The approximate number of words in the content.
.Hugo See Hugo Variables below.
.IsHome True if this is the home page.
.IsNode Always false for regular content pages.
.IsPage Always true for regular content pages.
.IsTranslated Whether there are any translations to display.
.Keywords The meta keywords for this content.
.Kind What kind of page is this: is one of page, home, section, taxonomy or taxonomyTerm. There are also RSS, sitemap, robotsTXT and 404, but these will only available during rendering of that kind of page, and not available in any of the Pages collections.
.Lang Language taken from the language extension notation.
.Language A language object that points to this the language’s definition in the site config.
.Lastmod The date the content was last modified.
.LinkTitle Access when creating links to this content. Will use linktitle if set in front matter, else title.
.Next Pointer to the following content (based on pub date).
.NextInSection Pointer to the following content within the same section (based on pub date)
.Pages a collection of associated pages. This will be nil for regular content pages. This is an alias for .Data.Pages.
.Permalink The Permanent link for this page.
.Prev Pointer to the previous content (based on pub date).
.PrevInSection Pointer to the previous content within the same section (based on pub date). For example, {{if .PrevInSection}}{{.PrevInSection.Permalink}}{{end}}.
.PublishDate The date the content is published on.
.RSSLink Link to the taxonomies’ RSS link.
.RawContent Raw Markdown content without the metadata header. Useful with remarkjs.com
.ReadingTime The estimated time it takes to read the content in minutes.
.Ref Returns the permalink for a given reference. Example: .Ref "sample.md". See cross-references. Does not handle in-page fragments correctly.
.RelPermalink The Relative permanent link for this page.
.RelRef Returns the relative permalink for a given reference. Example: RelRef "sample.md". See cross-references. Does not handle in-page fragments.
.Section The section this content belongs to.
.Site See Site Variables below.
.Summary A generated summary of the content for easily showing a snippet in a summary view. Note that the breakpoint can be set manually by inserting <!--more--> at the appropriate place in the content page. See Summaries for more details.
.TableOfContents The rendered table of contents for this content.
.Title The title for this page.
.Translations A list of translated versions of the current page. See Multilingual for more info.
.Truncated A boolean, true if the .Summary is truncated. Useful for showing a “Read more…” link only if necessary. See Summaries for more details.
.Type The content type (e.g. post).
.URL The relative URL for this page. Note that if URL is set directly in frontmatter, that URL is returned as-is.
.UniqueID The MD5-checksum of the content file’s path
.Weight Assigned weight (in the front matter) to this content, used in sorting.
.WordCount The number of words in the content.
Page Params
Any other value defined in the front matter, including taxonomies, will be made available under .Params.
For example, the tags and categories taxonomies are accessed with:
- .Params.tags
- .Params.categories
All Params are only accessible using all lowercase characters.
This is particularly useful for the introduction of user defined fields in content files. For example, a Hugo website on book reviews could have in the front matter of /content/review/book01.md
---
...
affiliatelink: "http://www.my-book-link.here"
recommendedby: "my Mother"
---
Which would then be accessible to a template at /themes/yourtheme/layouts/review/single.html through .Params.affiliatelink and .Params.recommendedby, respectively. Two common situations where these could be introduced are as a value of a certain attribute (like href="" below) or by itself to be displayed. Sample syntaxes include:
<h3><a href={{ printf "%s" $.Params.affiliatelink }}>Buy this book</a></h3>
<p>It was recommended by {{ .Params.recommendedby }}.</p>
which would render
<h3><a href="http://www.my-book-link.here">Buy this book</a></h3>
<p>It was recommended by my Mother.</p>
See also: Archetypes for consistency of Params across pieces of content.
Param method
In Hugo you can declare params both for the site and the individual page. A common use case is to have a general value for the site and a more specific value for some of the pages (i.e. a header image):
{{ $.Param "header_image" }}
The .Param method provides a way to resolve a single value whether it’s
in a page parameter or a site parameter.
When frontmatter contains nested fields, like:
---
author:
given_name: John
family_name: Feminella
display_name: John Feminella
---
then .Param can access them by concatenating the field names together with a
dot:
{{ $.Param "author.display_name" }}
If your frontmatter contains a top-level key that is ambiguous with a nested key, as in the following case,
---
favorites.flavor: vanilla
favorites:
flavor: chocolate
---
then the top-level key will be preferred. In the previous example, this
{{ $.Param "favorites.flavor" }}
will print vanilla, not chocolate.
Taxonomy Terms Page Variables
Taxonomy Terms pages are of the type Page and have the following additional variables. These are available in layouts/_defaults/terms.html for example.
.Data.Singular The singular name of the taxonomy
.Data.Plural The plural name of the taxonomy
.Data.Pages the list of pages in this taxonomy
.Data.Terms The taxonomy itself
.Data.Terms.Alphabetical The Terms alphabetized
.Data.Terms.ByCount The Terms ordered by popularity
The last two can also be reversed: .Data.Terms.Alphabetical.Reverse, .Data.Terms.ByCount.Reverse.
Taxonomies elsewhere
The .Site.Taxonomies variable holds all taxonomies defines site-wide. It is a map of the taxonomy name to a list of its values. For example: “tags” -> [“tag1”, “tag2”, “tag3”]. Each value, though, is not a string but rather a Taxonomy variable.
The Taxonomy variable
The Taxonomy variable, available as .Site.Taxonomies.tags for example, contains the list of tags (values) and, for each of those, their corresponding content pages.
Site Variables
Also available is .Site which has the following:
.Site.BaseURL The base URL for the site as defined in the site configuration file.
.Site.RSSLink The URL for the site RSS.
.Site.Taxonomies The taxonomies for the entire site. Replaces the now-obsolete .Site.Indexes since v0.11. Also see section Taxonomies elsewhere.
.Site.Pages Array of all content ordered by Date, newest first. Replaces the now-deprecated .Site.Recent starting v0.13. This array contains only the pages in the current language.
.Site.AllPages Array of all pages regardless of their translation.
.Site.Params A container holding the values from the params section of your site configuration file. For example, a TOML config file might look like this:
baseURL = "http://yoursite.example.com/"
[params]
description = "Tesla's Awesome Hugo Site"
author = "Nikola Tesla"
.Site.Sections Top level directories of the site.
.Site.Files All of the source files of the site.
.Site.Menus All of the menus in the site.
.Site.Title A string representing the title of the site.
.Site.Author A map of the authors as defined in the site configuration.
.Site.LanguageCode A string representing the language as defined in the site configuration. This is mostly used to populate the RSS feeds with the right language code.
.Site.DisqusShortname A string representing the shortname of the Disqus shortcode as defined in the site configuration.
.Site.GoogleAnalytics A string representing your tracking code for Google Analytics as defined in the site configuration.
.Site.Copyright A string representing the copyright of your web site as defined in the site configuration.
.Site.LastChange A string representing the date/time of the most recent change to your site, based on the date variable in the front matter of your content pages.
.Site.Permalinks A string to override the default permalink format. Defined in the site configuration.
.Site.BuildDrafts A boolean (Default: false) to indicate whether to build drafts. Defined in the site configuration.
.Site.Data Custom data, see Data Files.
.Site.IsMultiLingual Whether there are more than one language in this site.
See Multilingual for more info.
.Site.Language This indicates which language you are currently rendering the website for. This is an object with the attributes set in your language definition in your site config.
.Site.Language.Lang The language code of the current locale, e.g. en.
.Site.Language.Weight The weight that defines the order in the .Site.Languages list.
.Site.Language.LanguageName The full language name, e.g. English.
.Site.LanguagePrefix This can be used to prefix theURLs with whats needed to point to the correct language. It will even work when only one language defined. See also the functions absLangURL and relLangURL.
.Site.Languages An ordered list (ordered by defined weight) of languages.
.Site.RegularPages A shortcut to the regular page collection. Equivalent to where .Site.Pages "Kind" "page".
File Variables
The .File variable gives you additional information of a page.
Note:
.Fileis only accessible on Pages that has a content page attached to it.
Available are the following attributes:
.File.Path The original relative path of the page, e.g. content/posts/foo.en.md
.File.LogicalName The name of the content file that represents a page, e.g. foo.en.md
.File.TranslationBaseName The filename without extension or optional language identifier, e.g. foo
.File.BaseFileName The filename without extension, e.g. foo.en
.File.Ext or .File.Extension The file extension of the content file, e.g. md
.File.Lang The language associated with the given file if Multilingual is enabled, e.g. en
.File.Dir Given the path content/posts/dir1/dir2/, the relative directory path of the content file will be returned, e.g. posts/dir1/dir2/
Hugo Variables
Also available is .Hugo which has the following:
.Hugo.Generator Meta tag for the version of Hugo that generated the site. Highly recommended to be included by default in all theme headers so we can start to track the usage and popularity of Hugo. Unlike other variables it outputs a complete HTML tag, e.g. <meta name="generator" content="Hugo 0.15" />
.Hugo.Version The current version of the Hugo binary you are using e.g. 0.13-DEV
.Hugo.CommitHash The git commit hash of the current Hugo binary e.g. 0e8bed9ccffba0df554728b46c5bbf6d78ae5247
.Hugo.BuildDate The compile date of the current Hugo binary formatted with RFC 3339 e.g. 2002-10-02T10:00:00-05:00