hugo: Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS)

What is hugo?

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go that renders a complete site in seconds, often less, and it is aimed at developers, technical writers, and content teams who build blogs, documentation sites, portfolios, landing pages, and corporate sites as static files.

What it is

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go and released under the Apache-2.0 licence, with an advanced templating system, fast asset pipelines, multilingual support, and a taxonomy system. It lives in the static site generator ecosystem, and its output is a set of files that are deployed to a host rather than served from a running application. Development uses an embedded web server that immediately shows changes to content, structure, behavior, and presentation, after which the site is deployed to a host or pushed to a Git provider for automated builds and deployment. The project is developed by bep, spf13 and contributors, holds 89853 stars and 8380 forks, and its topic list covers blog-engine, cms, content-management-system, documentation-tool, go, hugo, and static-site-generator.

The concrete problem it solves is the build-and-publish step itself. Rather than hand-assembling markup, wiring a build chain for CSS, Sass, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, and images, and then keeping a separate publishing process in sync, a site author keeps content and configuration in one project and lets Hugo produce the finished asset output. Hugo Modules extend that by letting a project share content, assets, data, translations, themes, templates, and configuration with other projects through public or private Git repositories, so shared building blocks do not have to be copied between repositories.

Key capabilities

Embedded web server for development, showing changes to content, structure, behavior, and presentation as they are made.
CSS processing that bundles, transforms, minifies, creates source maps, performs SRI hashing, and integrates with PostCSS.
Image processing that converts, resizes, crops, rotates, adjusts colors, applies filters, overlays text and images, and extracts metadata.
JavaScript bundling that transpiles TypeScript and JSX to JavaScript, bundles, tree shakes, minifies, creates source maps, and performs SRI hashing.
Sass processing that transpiles Sass to CSS using Dart Sass, bundles, tree shakes, minifies, creates source maps, performs SRI hashing, and integrates with PostCSS.
Tailwind CSS processing that compiles utility classes into standard CSS, bundles, tree shakes, optimizes, minifies, and performs SRI hashing.
Four editions, standard, deploy, extended, and extended/deploy, where the deploy editions add the deployment workflow and the extended editions add the additional asset features.

Who uses it and how

Corporate, government, nonprofit, education, news, event, and project sites, where the published output is a static bundle rather than an application runtime.
Documentation sites, which map directly onto the content, template, and asset structure Hugo provides.
Image portfolios, landing pages, and business, professional, and personal blogs that need the image and CSS pipelines.
Resumes and CVs, a small-scale use of the same build-and-deploy workflow.
Teams using Git-based publishing, where changes are pushed to a Git provider for automated builds and deployment, or deployed with Hugo Deploy.

Getting started

Installation is documented per platform for Linux, macOS, Windows, and DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, with prebuilt binaries available from the latest release on GitHub; Git is listed as a prerequisite. Development then runs through Hugo's embedded web server, and publishing goes to a host or through Hugo Deploy.

How it compares

The provided facts name no competing static site generators and no paid products that Hugo replaces, so no licence, hosting, data-ownership, or cost comparison can be drawn here. On the facts given, Hugo stands alone in this registry entry.

When to use it — and when not to

A self-hoster must supply Git, and Dart Sass for the Sass pipeline, plus a host or Git-provider build setup for publishing; the project itself is a Go binary rather than a service with a database to operate. Anyone who needs a database-backed, server-rendered CMS with in-browser editing should not pick Hugo, since its model is content plus configuration compiled into static output. The README is a link-heavy overview rather than a full manual, differences between the four editions are only partly listed, and 235 open issues remain, so edition selection and feature confirmation require the documentation site.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

A fast and flexible static site generator built with love by bep, spf13, and friends in Go.

Overview

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go, optimized for speed and designed for flexibility. With its advanced templating system and fast asset pipelines, Hugo renders a complete site in seconds, often less.

Due to its flexible framework, multilingual support, and powerful taxonomy system, Hugo is widely used to create:

Corporate, government, nonprofit, education, news, event, and project sites
Documentation sites
Image portfolios
Landing pages
Business, professional, and personal blogs
Resumes and CVs

Use Hugo's embedded web server during development to instantly see changes to content, structure, behavior, and presentation. Then deploy the site to your host, or push changes to your Git provider for automated builds and deployment.

Hugo's fast asset pipelines include:

CSS Processing – Bundle, transform, minify, create source maps, perform SRI hashing, and integrate with PostCSS.
Image processing – Convert, resize, crop, rotate, adjust colors, apply filters, overlay text and images, and extract metadata
JavaScript bundling – Transpile TypeScript and JSX to JavaScript, bundle, tree shake, minify, create source maps, and perform SRI hashing.
Sass processing – Transpile Sass to CSS, bundle, tree shake, minify, create source maps, perform SRI hashing, and integrate with PostCSS
Tailwind CSS processing – Compile Tailwind CSS utility classes into standard CSS, bundle, tree shake, optimize, minify, perform SRI hashing, and integrate with PostCSS

And with Hugo Modules, you can share content, assets, data, translations, themes, templates, and configuration with other projects via public or private Git repositories.

See the features section of the documentation for a comprehensive summary of Hugo's capabilities.

Editions

Hugo is available in several editions. Use the standard edition unless you need additional features.

Feature	standard	deploy	extended	extended/deploy
Core features	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:
Direct cloud deployment (1)	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:
LibSass support (2)	:x:	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:

(1) Deploy your site directly to a Google Cloud Storage bucket, an AWS S3 bucket, or an Azure Storage container. See details.

(2) Transpile Sass to CSS via embedded LibSass. Note that embedded LibSass was deprecated in v0.153.0 and will be removed in a future release. Use the Dart Sass transpiler instead, which is compatible with any edition.

Installation

Install Hugo from a prebuilt binary, package manager, or package repository. Please see the installation instructions for your operating system:

Build from source

To build Hugo from source you must install:

Git
Go version 1.26.0 or later

Standard edition

To build and install the standard edition:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go install github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Deploy edition

To build and install the deploy edition:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go install -tags withdeploy github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Extended edition

To build and install the extended edition, first install a C compiler such as GCC or Clang and then run the following command.

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Extended/deploy edition

To build and install the extended/deploy edition, first install a C compiler such as GCC or Clang and then run the following command.

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended,withdeploy github.com/gohugoio/hugo@latest

Documentation

Hugo's documentation includes installation instructions, a quick start guide, conceptual explanations, reference information, and examples.

Please submit documentation issues and pull requests to the documentation repository.

Support

Please do not use the issue queue for questions or troubleshooting. Unless you are certain that your issue is a software defect, use the forum.

Hugo's forum is an active community of users and developers who answer questions, share knowledge, and provide examples. A quick search of over 20,000 topics will often answer your question. Please be sure to read about requesting help before asking your first question.

Contributing

You can contribute to the Hugo project by:

Answering questions on the forum
Improving the documentation
Monitoring the issue queue
Creating or improving themes
Squashing bugs

Please submit documentation issues and pull requests to the documentation repository.

If you have an idea for an enhancement or new feature, create a new topic on the forum in the "Feature" category. This will help you to:

Determine if the capability already exists
Measure interest
Refine the concept

If there is sufficient interest, create a proposal. Do not submit a pull request until the project lead accepts the proposal.

For a complete guide to contributing to Hugo, see the Contribution Guide.

License

For the Hugo source code, see LICENSE.

We also bundle some libraries in binary/WASM form:

Dependencies

Hugo stands on the shoulders of great open source libraries. Run hugo env --logLevel info to display a list of dependencies.

See current dependencies

cel.dev/expr="v0.25.1"
cloud.google.com/go/auth/oauth2a

Frequently asked questions

Is hugo free to use?

hugo is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does hugo do?

The world’s fastest framework for building websites.

What is hugo written in?

hugo is primarily written in Go. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo, and it has 89,854 GitHub stars.