---
aliases:
- /doc/configuration/
lastmod: 2016-09-17
date: 2013-07-01
linktitle: Configuration
menu:
  main:
    parent: getting started
next: /overview/source-directory
toc: true
prev: /overview/usage
title: Configuring Hugo
weight: 40
---
The directory structure of a Hugo web site—or more precisely,
of the source files containing its content and templates—provide
most of the configuration information that Hugo needs.
Therefore, in essence,
many web sites wouldn't actually need a configuration file.
This is because Hugo is designed to recognize certain typical usage patterns
(and it expects them, by default).

Nevertheless, Hugo does search for a configuration file bearing
a particular name in the root of your web site's source directory.
First, it looks for a `./config.toml` file.
If that's not present, it will seek a `./config.yaml` file,
followed by a `./config.json` file.

In this `config` file for your web site,
you can include precise directions to Hugo regarding
how it should render your site, as well as define its menus,
and set various other site-wide parameters.

Another way that web site configuration can be accomplished is through
operating system environment variables.
For instance, the following command will work on Unix-like systems—it
sets a web site's title:
```bash
$ env HUGO_TITLE="Some Title" hugo
```
(**Note:** all such environment variable names must be prefixed with
<code>HUGO_</code>.)

## Examples

Following is a typical example of a YAML configuration file.
Three periods end the document:

```yaml
---
baseURL: "http://yoursite.example.com/"
...
```
Following is an example TOML configuration file with some default values.
The values under `[params]` will populate the `.Site.Params` variable
for use in templates:

```toml
contentDir = "content"
layoutDir = "layouts"
publishDir = "public"
buildDrafts = false
baseURL = "http://yoursite.example.com/"
canonifyURLs = true

[taxonomies]
  category = "categories"
  tag = "tags"

[params]
  description = "Tesla's Awesome Hugo Site"
  author = "Nikola Tesla"
```
Here is a YAML configuration file which sets a few more options:

```yaml
---
baseURL: "http://yoursite.example.com/"
title: "Yoyodyne Widget Blogging"
footnoteReturnLinkContents: "↩"
permalinks:
  post: /:year/:month/:title/
params:
  Subtitle: "Spinning the cogs in the widgets"
  AuthorName: "John Doe"
  GitHubUser: "spf13"
  ListOfFoo:
    - "foo1"
    - "foo2"
  SidebarRecentLimit: 5
...
```
## Configuration variables

Following is a list of Hugo-defined variables you can configure,
along with their current, default values:

    ---
    archetypeDir:               "archetype"
    # hostname (and path) to the root, e.g. http://spf13.com/
    baseURL:                    ""
    # include content marked as draft
    buildDrafts:                false
    # include content with publishdate in the future
    buildFuture:                false
    # include content already expired
    buildExpired:               false
    # enable this to make all relative URLs relative to content root. Note that this does not affect absolute URLs.
    relativeURLs:               false
    canonifyURLs:               false
    # config file (default is path/config.yaml|json|toml)
    config:                     "config.toml"
    contentDir:                 "content"
    dataDir:                    "data"
    defaultExtension:           "html"
    defaultLayout:              "post"
    # Missing translations will default to this content language
    defaultContentLanguage:     "en"
    # Renders the default content language in subdir, e.g. /en/. The root directory / will redirect to /en/
    defaultContentLanguageInSubdir: false
    disableLiveReload:          false
    # Do not build RSS files
    disableRSS:                 false
    # Do not build Sitemap file
    disableSitemap:             false
    # Build robots.txt file
    enableRobotsTXT:            false
    # Do not render 404 page
    disable404:                 false
    # Do not inject generator meta tag on homepage
    disableHugoGeneratorInject: false
    # edit new content with this editor, if provided
    editor:                     ""
    # Enable Emoji emoticons support for page content.
    # See www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com
    enableEmoji:				false
    # Show a placeholder instead of the default value or an empty string if a translation is missing
    enableMissingTranslationPlaceholders: false
    footnoteAnchorPrefix:       ""
    footnoteReturnLinkContents: ""
    # google analytics tracking id
    googleAnalytics:            ""
    languageCode:               ""
    layoutDir:                  "layouts"
    # Enable Logging
    log:                        false
    # Log File path (if set, logging enabled automatically)
    logFile:                    ""
    # "yaml", "toml", "json"
    metaDataFormat:             "toml"
    newContentEditor:           ""
    # Don't sync modification time of files
    noTimes:                    false
    paginate:                   10
    paginatePath:               "page"
    permalinks:
    # Pluralize titles in lists using inflect
    pluralizeListTitles:        true
    # Preserve special characters in taxonomy names ("Gérard Depardieu" vs "Gerard Depardieu")
    preserveTaxonomyNames:      false
    # filesystem path to write files to
    publishDir:                 "public"
    # enables syntax guessing for code fences without specified language
    pygmentsCodeFencesGuessSyntax: false
    # color-codes for highlighting derived from this style
    pygmentsStyle:              "monokai"
    # true: use pygments-css or false: color-codes directly
    pygmentsUseClasses:         false
    # default sitemap configuration map
    sitemap:
    # filesystem path to read files relative from
    source:                     ""
    staticDir:                  "static"
    # display memory and timing of different steps of the program
    stepAnalysis:               false
    # theme to use (located by default in /themes/THEMENAME/)
    themesDir:                  "themes"
    theme:                      ""
    title:                      ""
    # if true, use /filename.html instead of /filename/
    uglyURLs:                   false
    # Do not make the url/path to lowercase
    disablePathToLower:         false
    # if true, auto-detect Chinese/Japanese/Korean Languages in the content. (.Summary and .WordCount can work properly in CJKLanguage)
    hasCJKLanguage:             false
    # verbose output
    verbose:                    false
    # verbose logging
    verboseLog:                 false
    # watch filesystem for changes and recreate as needed
    watch:                      true
    ---

## Ignore various files when rendering

The following statement inside `./config.toml` will cause Hugo to ignore files
ending with `.foo` and `.boo` when rendering:

```toml
ignoreFiles = [ "\\.foo$", "\\.boo$" ]
```
The above is a list of regular expressions.
Note that the backslash (`\`) character is escaped, to keep TOML happy.

## Configure Blackfriday rendering

[Blackfriday](https://github.com/russross/blackfriday) is Hugo's
[Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
rendering engine.

In the main, Hugo typically configures Blackfriday with a sane set of defaults.
These defaults should fit most use cases, reasonably well.

However, if you have unusual needs with respect to Markdown,
Hugo exposes some of its Blackfriday behavior options for you to alter.
The following table lists these Hugo options,
paired with the corresponding flags from Blackfriday's source code (for the latter, see
[html.go](https://github.com/russross/blackfriday/blob/master/html.go) and
[markdown.go](https://github.com/russross/blackfriday/blob/master/markdown.go)):

<table class="table table-bordered-configuration">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Flag</th>
            <th>Default</th>
            <th>Blackfriday flag</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>taskLists</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td><code></code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>false</code> turns off GitHub-style automatic task/TODO
                list generation.
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>smartypants</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_USE_SMARTYPANTS</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>false</code> disables smart punctuation substitutions
                including smart quotes, smart dashes, smart fractions, etc.
                If <code>true</code>, it may be fine-tuned with the
                <code>angledQuotes</code>,
                <code>fractions</code>,
                <code>smartDashes</code> and
                <code>latexDashes</code> flags (see below).
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>angledQuotes</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>false</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_SMARTYPANTS_ANGLED_QUOTES</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>true</code> enables smart, angled double quotes.<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong>
                    <code>"Hugo"</code> renders to
                    «Hugo» instead of “Hugo”.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>fractions</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_SMARTYPANTS_FRACTIONS</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>false</code> disables smart fractions.<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong>
                    <code>5/12</code> renders to
                    <sup>5</sup>&frasl;<sub>12</sub>
                    (<code>&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;frasl;&lt;sub&gt;12&lt;/sub&gt;</code>).<br>
                    <strong>Caveat:</strong>
                    Even with <code>fractions = false</code>,
                    Blackfriday still converts
                    1/2, 1/4 and 3/4 respectively to
                    ½ (<code>&amp;frac12;</code>),
                    ¼ (<code>&amp;frac14;</code>) and
                    ¾ (<code>&amp;frac34;</code>),
                    but only these three.</small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>smartDashes</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_SMARTYPANTS_DASHES</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>false</code> disables smart dashes; i.e., the conversion
                of multiple hyphens into en&nbsp;dash or em&nbsp;dash.
                If <code>true</code>, its behavior can be modified with the
                <code>latexDashes</code> flag below.
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>latexDashes</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_SMARTYPANTS_LATEX_DASHES</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>false</code> disables LaTeX-style smart dashes and
                selects conventional smart dashes. Assuming
                <code>smartDashes</code> (above), if this is:
                <ul>
                    <li>
                        <strong><code>true</code>,</strong> then
                        <code>--</code> is translated into “&ndash;”
                        (<code>&amp;ndash;</code>), whereas
                        <code>---</code> is translated into “&mdash;”
                        (<code>&amp;mdash;</code>).
                    </li>
                    <li>
                        <strong><code>false</code>,</strong> then
                        <code>--</code> is translated into “&mdash;”
                        (<code>&amp;mdash;</code>), whereas a
                        <em>spaced</em> single hyphen between two words
                        is translated into an en&nbsp;dash&mdash;e.g.,
                        <code>12 June - 3 July</code> becomes
                        <code>12 June &amp;ndash; 3 July</code>.
                    </li>
                </ul>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>hrefTargetBlank</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>false</code></td>
            <td><code>HTML_HREF_TARGET_BLANK</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>true</code> opens external links in a new window or tab.
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>plainIDAnchors</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>true</code></td>
            <td>
                <code>FootnoteAnchorPrefix</code> and
                <code>HeaderIDSuffix</code>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>true</code> renders any header and footnote IDs
                without the document ID.<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong>
                    renders <code>#my-header</code> instead of
                    <code>#my-header:bec3ed8ba720b9073ab75abcf3ba5d97</code>.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>extensions</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>[]</code></td>
            <td><code>EXTENSION_*</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                Enable one or more of Blackfriday's Markdown extensions
                (if they aren't Hugo defaults).<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong> &nbsp;
                    Include <code>"hardLineBreak"</code>
                    in the list to enable Blackfriday's
                    <code>EXTENSION_HARD_LINE_BREAK</code>.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>extensionsmask</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>[]</code></td>
            <td><code>EXTENSION_*</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                Disable one or more of Blackfriday's Markdown extensions
                (if they are Hugo defaults).<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong> &nbsp;
                    Include <code>"autoHeaderIds"</code>
                    in the list to disable Blackfriday's
                    <code>EXTENSION_AUTO_HEADER_IDS</code>.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>sourceRelativeLinksEval</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>false</code></td>
            <td><code>none</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                <code>true</code> enables source file-based relative linking (à la Github).
                Relative links to Markdown and static files within a page
                will be evaluated relative to the location of that page,
                and then converted to HTML links during rendering.<br>
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong>
                    <code>[some-reference-text](../other/page.md)</code> in
                    <code>./content/total/overview.md</code> will link to
                    <code>./content/other/overview.md</code> and render to
                    <code>/other/overview/</code> in the HTML output.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td><code><strong>sourceRelativeLinksProjectFolder</strong></code></td>
            <td><code>/docs/content</code></td>
            <td><code>none</code></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td class="purpose-description" colspan="3">
                <span class="purpose-title">Purpose:</span>
                Set a sub-folder for source file-based relative linking
                on a Hugo Project (i.e., a web site). When
                <code>sourceRelativeLinksEval</code> (see above) is enabled,
                some source level paths may contain absolute respository
                paths to Markdown or static files.
                The absolute portion of these paths should be removed
                before trying to match the intended links.<br />
                <small>
                    <strong>Example:</strong>
                    Assuming your documentation resides in
                    <code>./docs/content</code>,
                    then a reference within
                    <code>./docs/content/total/overview.md</code> to
                    <code>[some-reference-text](/docs/content/other/page.md)</code>
                    will link to
                    <code>./docs/content/other/overview.md</code> and render to
                    <code>/other/overview/</code> in the HTML output.
                </small>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>

**Notes**

* These flags are **case sensitive** (as of Hugo v0.15)!
* These flags must be grouped under the `blackfriday` key
and can be set on **both the site level and the page level**.
Any setting on a page will override the site setting
there. For example:

<table class="table">
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>TOML</th>
            <th>YAML</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr style="vertical-align: top;">
            <td style="width: 50%;">
<pre><code>[blackfriday]
  angledQuotes = true
  fractions = false
  plainIDAnchors = true
  extensions = ["hardLineBreak"]
</code></pre>
            </td>
            <td>
<pre><code>blackfriday:
  angledQuotes: true
  fractions: false
  plainIDAnchors: true
  extensions:
    - hardLineBreak
</code></pre>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>