Development

Introduction

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.

Prerequisites

To build the extended or extended/deploy edition from source you must:

1. Install Git
2. Install Go version 1.23.0 or later
3. Install a C compiler, either GCC or Clang
4. Update your PATH environment variable as described in the Go documentation

GitHub workflow

Use this workflow to create and submit pull requests.

Step 1

Fork the project repository.

Step 2

Clone your fork.

Step 3

Create a new branch with a descriptive name that includes the corresponding issue number.

For a new feature:

git checkout -b feat/implement-some-feature-99999

For a bug fix:

git checkout -b fix/fix-some-bug-99999

Step 4

Make changes.

Step 5

Compile and install.

To compile and install the standard edition:

go install

To compile and install the extended edition:

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended

To compile and install the extended/deploy edition:

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended,withdeploy

Step 6

Test your changes:

go test ./...

Step 7

Commit your changes with a descriptive commit message:

• Provide a summary on the first line, typically 50 characters or less, followed by a blank line.
• Optionally, provide a detailed description where each line is 80 characters or less, followed by a blank line.
• Add one or more “Fixes” or “Closes” keywords, each on its own line, referencing the issues addressed by this change.

For example:

git commit -m "tpl/strings: Create wrap function

The strings.Wrap function wraps a string into one or more lines,
splitting the string after the given number of characters, but not
splitting in the middle of a word.

Fixes #99998
Closes #99999"

See the commit message guidelines for details.

Step 8

Push the new branch to your fork of the documentation repository.

Step 9

Visit the project repository and create a pull request (PR).

Step 10

A project maintainer will review your PR and may request changes. You may delete your branch after the maintainer merges your PR.

Building from source

You can build, install, and test Hugo at any point in its development history. The examples below build and install the extended version of Hugo.

To build and install the latest release:

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

To build and install a specific release:

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended github.com/gohugoio/hugo@v0.137.1

To build and install at the latest commit on the master branch:

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

To build and install at a specific commit:

CGO_ENABLED=1 go install -tags extended github.com/gohugoio/hugo@0851c17