Front Matter

Front matter allows you to keep metadata attached to an instance of a content type—i.e., embedded inside a content file—and is one of the many features that gives Hugo its strength.

Front Matter Formats

Hugo supports four formats for front matter, each with their own identifying tokens.

TOML

identified by opening and closing +++.

YAML

identified by opening and closing ---.

JSON

a single JSON object surrounded by ‘{’ and ‘}’, followed by a new line.

ORG

a group of Org mode keywords in the format ‘#+KEY: VALUE’. Any line that does not start with #+ ends the front matter section. Keyword values can be either strings (#+KEY: VALUE) or a whitespace separated list of strings (#+KEY[]: VALUE_1 VALUE_2).

Example

categories:
- Development
- VIM
date: "2012-04-06"
description: spf13-vim is a cross platform distribution of vim plugins and resources
  for Vim.
slug: spf13-vim-3-0-release-and-new-website
tags:
- .vimrc
- plugins
- spf13-vim
- vim
title: spf13-vim 3.0 release and new website

categories = ["Development", "VIM"]
date = "2012-04-06"
description = "spf13-vim is a cross platform distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim."
slug = "spf13-vim-3-0-release-and-new-website"
tags = [".vimrc", "plugins", "spf13-vim", "vim"]
title = "spf13-vim 3.0 release and new website"

{
   "categories": [
      "Development",
      "VIM"
   ],
   "date": "2012-04-06",
   "description": "spf13-vim is a cross platform distribution of vim plugins and resources for Vim.",
   "slug": "spf13-vim-3-0-release-and-new-website",
   "tags": [
      ".vimrc",
      "plugins",
      "spf13-vim",
      "vim"
   ],
   "title": "spf13-vim 3.0 release and new website"
}

Front Matter Variables

Predefined

There are a few predefined variables that Hugo is aware of. See Page Variables for how to call many of these predefined variables in your templates.

aliases

an array of one or more aliases (e.g., old published paths of renamed content) that will be created in the output directory structure . See Aliases for details.

audio

an array of paths to audio files related to the page; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:audio.

cascade

a map of Front Matter keys whose values are passed down to the page’s descendents unless overwritten by self or a closer ancestor’s cascade. See Front Matter Cascade for details.

date

the datetime assigned to this page. This is usually fetched from the date field in front matter, but this behaviour is configurable.

description

the description for the content.

draft

if true, the content will not be rendered unless the --buildDrafts flag is passed to the hugo command.

expiryDate

the datetime at which the content should no longer be published by Hugo; expired content will not be rendered unless the --buildExpired flag is passed to the hugo command.

headless

if true, sets a leaf bundle to be headless.

images

an array of paths to images related to the page; used by internal templates such as _internal/twitter_cards.html.

isCJKLanguage

if true, Hugo will explicitly treat the content as a CJK language; both .Summary and .WordCount work properly in CJK languages.

keywords

the meta keywords for the content.

layout

the layout Hugo should select from the lookup order when rendering the content. If a type is not specified in the front matter, Hugo will look for the layout of the same name in the layout directory that corresponds with a content’s section. See “Defining a Content Type”

lastmod

the datetime at which the content was last modified.

linkTitle

used for creating links to content; if set, Hugo defaults to using the linktitle before the title. Hugo can also order lists of content by linktitle.

markup

experimental; specify "rst" for reStructuredText (requiresrst2html) or "md" (default) for Markdown.

outputs

allows you to specify output formats specific to the content. See output formats.

publishDate

if in the future, content will not be rendered unless the --buildFuture flag is passed to hugo.

resources

used for configuring page bundle resources. See Page Resources.

series

an array of series this page belongs to, as a subset of the series taxonomy; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:see_also.

slug

appears as the tail of the output URL. A value specified in front matter will override the segment of the URL based on the filename.

summary

text used when providing a summary of the article in the .Summary page variable; details available in the content-summaries section.

title

the title for the content.

type

the type of the content; this value will be automatically derived from the directory (i.e., the section) if not specified in front matter.

url

the full path to the content from the web root. It makes no assumptions about the path of the content file. It also ignores any language prefixes of the multilingual feature.

videos

an array of paths to videos related to the page; used by the opengraph internal template to populate og:video.

weight

used for ordering your content in lists. Lower weight gets higher precedence. So content with lower weight will come first.

<taxonomies>

field name of the plural form of the index. See tags and categories in the above front matter examples. Note that the plural form of user-defined taxonomies cannot be the same as any of the predefined front matter variables.

User-Defined

You can add fields to your front matter arbitrarily to meet your needs. These user-defined key-values are placed into a single .Params variable for use in your templates.

The following fields can be accessed via .Params.include_toc and .Params.show_comments, respectively. The Variables section provides more information on using Hugo’s page- and site-level variables in your templates.

include_toc: true
show_comments: false

include_toc = true
show_comments = false

{
   "include_toc": true,
   "show_comments": false
}

Front Matter Cascade

Any node or section can pass down to descendents a set of Front Matter values as long as defined underneath the reserved cascade Front Matter key.

Example

In content/blog/_index.md

cascade:
  banner: images/typewriter.jpg
title: Blog

title = "Blog"

[cascade]
  banner = "images/typewriter.jpg"

{
   "cascade": {
      "banner": "images/typewriter.jpg"
   },
   "title": "Blog"
}

With the above example the Blog section page and its descendents will return images/typewriter.jpg when .Params.banner is invoked unless:

• Said descendent has its own banner value set
• Or a closer ancestor node has its own cascade.banner value set.

Order Content Through Front Matter

You can assign content-specific weight in the front matter of your content. These values are especially useful for ordering in list views. You can use weight for ordering of content and the convention of <TAXONOMY>_weight for ordering content within a taxonomy. See Ordering and Grouping Hugo Lists to see how weight can be used to organize your content in list views.

Override Global Markdown Configuration

It’s possible to set some options for Markdown rendering in a content’s front matter as an override to the BlackFriday rendering options set in your project configuration.

Front Matter Format Specs

• TOML Spec
• YAML Spec
• JSON Spec