Debugging Hugo

Oct 05, 2022



Reading time: 1 minute

I have been building Hugo websites for about half a year now. In those six months I have struggled a lot and learned a lot. I have learned that my learning strategy is “learning by error”. So, looking back, I am now telling myself: it is time to learn how to properly debug Hugo.

I ran into a problem where a layout had to be styled by adding a CSS class conditionally, with:

  <body class="{{ .Type }} {{ .Layout }}">

By reading An’s question on the forum I got a starting point for debugging. Now I know that by adding:

{{ printf "%#v" . }}

I can easily read the list of all the variables scoped to the current context (., a.k.a. “the dot”). In my case,

{{ printf "%#v" .Layout }}

will tell me which layout is in use on a page!

Sure, the Hugo documentation is a bit weird or incomplete at times. On the other hand, the Discourse channel is a wonderful place to learn Hugo, thanks to the time people devote to helping everybody out. See you there!

Happy coding!

Fenix & Joost