Hugo is a

static site generator Static site generators (SSGs) are engines that use text input files (such as Markdown, reStructuredText, and AsciiDoc) to generate static web pages. Static sites generated by static site generators do not require a backend after site generation, ...

written in Go. Steve Francia originally created Hugo as an open source project in 2013. Since v0.14 in 2015, Hugo has continued development under the lead of Bjørn Erik Pedersen with other contributors. Hugo is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Hugo is particularly noted for its speed, and Hugo's official website states it is "the world’s fastest framework for building websites". In July 2015,

Netlify Netlify is a remote-first cloud computing company that offers a development platform that includes build, deploy, and serverless backend services for web applications and dynamic websites. The platform is built on open web standards, making ...

began providing Hugo hosting. Notable adopters are

Smashing Magazine Smashing Magazine is an online magazine dedicated to web developers and web designers around the world. It was founded in 2006 bSven Lennartz(co-founder) anVitaly Friedman(editor-in-chief) as part of the German-based Smashing Media AG. Since 2012 ...

, which migrated from

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

to a JAMstack solution with Hugo in and in 2017, and Cloudflare, which switched its Developer Docs from Gatsby to Hugo in 2022.

Features

Hugo takes data files, i18n bundles, configuration, templates for layouts, static files, assets, and content written in

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown is ...

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

AsciiDoctor AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain-text mark-up conventions. AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other for ...

, or

Org-mode Org Mode (also: ''org-mode''; ) is a document editing, formatting, and organizing mode, designed for notes, planning, and authoring within the free software text editor Emacs. The name is used to encompass plain text files ("org files") that incl ...

and renders a static website. Some notable features are multilingual support, image processing, asset management, custom output formats, markdown render hooks and shortcodes. Nested sections allow for different types of content to be separated, e.g. for a website containing a blog and a podcast. Hugo can be used in combination with front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap or

Tailwind A tailwind is a wind that blows in the direction of travel of an object, while a headwind blows against the direction of travel. A tailwind increases the object's speed and reduces the time required to reach its destination, while a headwind has ...

. Hugo sites can be connected to cloud-based CMS software such as Netlify CMS, CloudCannon or Forestry enabling content editors to modify site content without coding knowledge.

References

External links

* *{{github, gohugoio/hugo, Hugo
Official free Hugo themes library

Premium Hugo themes
Blog software Static website generators Free static website generators Free software programmed in Go Software using the Apache license