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Use Docsy as a Hugo Module

Learn how to get started with Docsy by using the theme as a Hugo Module.

Hugo modules are the simplest and latest way to use Hugo themes like Docsy when building a website. Hugo uses the modules mechanism to pull in the theme files from the main Docsy repo at your chosen revision, and it’s easy to keep the theme up to date in your site. Our example site uses Docsy as a Hugo module.

To find out about other setup approaches, see our Get started overview. If you want to migrate an existing Docsy site to use Hugo Modules, see our migration guide.

Setup options with Hugo Modules

To use Docsy as a Hugo Module, you have a couple of options:

  • Copy and edit the source for the Docsy example site. This approach gives you a skeleton structure for your site, with top-level and documentation sections and templates that you can modify as necessary. The example site uses Docsy as a Hugo Module.
  • Build your own site using the Docsy theme. Specify the Docsy theme like any other Hugo theme when creating or updating your site. With this option, you’ll get Docsy look and feel, navigation, and other features, but you’ll need to specify your own site structure.

If you’re a beginner, we recommend that you get started by copying our example site. If you’re already familiar with Hugo or want a very different site structure, you can follow our guide to start a site from scratch, which gives you maximum flexibility at the cost of higher implementation effort. In both cases you need to follow our prerequisites guide to make sure that you have installed Hugo and all necessary dependencies.

1 - Before you begin

Prerequisites for building a site with Docsy as a Hugo Module.

This page describes the prerequisites for building a site that uses Docsy as a Hugo Module.

Install Hugo

You need a recent extended version (version 0.155.3 or later) of Hugo to do local builds and previews of sites (like this one) that use Docsy. If you install from the release page, make sure to get the extended Hugo version, which supports SCSS; you may need to scroll down the list of releases to see it.

For comprehensive Hugo documentation, see gohugo.io.

On Linux

Be careful using sudo apt-get install hugo, as it doesn’t get you the extended version for all Debian/Ubuntu versions, and may not be up-to-date with the most recent Hugo version.

If you’ve already installed Hugo, check your version:

hugo version

If the result is 0.155.3 or earlier, or if you don’t see Extended, you’ll need to install the latest version. You can see a complete list of Linux installation options in Install Hugo. The following shows you how to install Hugo from the release page:

  1. Go to the Hugo releases page.

  2. In the most recent release, scroll down until you find a list of Extended versions.

  3. Download the latest extended version.

  4. Create a new directory:

    mkdir hugo

  5. Extract the files you downloaded to hugo.

  6. Switch to your new directory:

    cd hugo

  7. Install Hugo:

    sudo install hugo /usr/bin

On macOS

Install Hugo using Brew.

As an npm module

You can conveniently install any Hugo version using hugo-extended (replace latest with the version you want to install):

npm install hugo-extended@latest --save-dev

Install Go language

Hugo’s commands for module management require that the Go programming language is installed on your system. Check whether go is already installed:

$ go version
go version go1.25.6

Ensure that you are using version 1.12 or higher.

If the go language is not installed on your system yet or if you need to upgrade, go to the download area of the Go website, choose the installer for your system architecture and execute it. Afterwards, check for a successful installation.

Install Git VCS client

Hugo’s commands for module management require that the git client is installed on your system. Check whether git is already present in your system:

$ git version
git version 2.52.0

If no git client is installed on your system yet, go to the Git website, download the installer for your system architecture and execute it. Afterwards, check for a successful installation.

Install PostCSS

To build or update your site’s CSS resources, you also need PostCSS to create the final assets. If you need to install it, you must have a recent version of NodeJS installed on your machine so you can use npm, the Node package manager. By default npm installs tools under the directory where you run npm install:

npm install -D autoprefixer
npm install -D postcss-cli

Starting in version 8 of postcss-cli, you must also separately install postcss:

npm install -D postcss

Note that versions of PostCSS later than 5.0.1 will not load autoprefixer if installed globally, you must use a local install.

Install/Upgrade Node.js

To ensure you can properly build your site beyond executing hugo server, you must have the latest long term support (LTS) Version of Node.js. If you do not have the latest LTS version, you may see one of the following errors:

Error: Error building site: POSTCSS: failed to transform "scss/main.css" (text/css): Unexpected identifier
#OR
/home/user/repos/my-new-site/themes/docsy/node_modules/hugo-extended/postinstall.js:1
import install from "./lib/install.js";
       ^^^^^^^

SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
    at Module._compile (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:723:23)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:789:10)
    at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:653:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:593:12)
    at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:585:3)
    at Function.Module.runMain (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:831:12)
    at startup (internal/bootstrap/node.js:283:19)
    at bootstrapNodeJSCore (internal/bootstrap/node.js:623:3)

What’s next?

With all prerequisites installed, choose how to start off with your new Hugo site

2 - Create a new site: start with a prepopulated site

Create a new Hugo site by using a clone of the Docsy example site as your starting point.

The simplest way to create a new Docsy site is to use the source of the Docsy example site as starting point. This approach gives you a skeleton structure for your site, with top-level and documentation sections and templates that you can modify as necessary. The example site automatically pulls in the Docsy theme as a Hugo Module, so it’s easy to keep up to date.

If you prefer to create a site from scratch, follow the instructions in Start a site from scratch.

TL;DR: Setup for the impatient expert

At your Unix shell or Windows command line, run the following command:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.14.3-dev https://github.com/google/docsy-example.git my-new-site
cd  my-new-site
hugo server

You now can preview your new site in your browser at http://localhost:1313.

Detailed Setup instructions

Clone the Docsy example site

The Example Site gives you a good starting point for building your docs site and is pre-configured to automatically pull in the Docsy theme as a Hugo Module. There are two different routes to get a local clone of the example site:

  • If you want to create a local copy only, choose option 1.
  • If you have a GitHub account and want to create a GitHub repo for your site go for option 2.

Option 1: Using the command line (local copy only)

If you want to use a remote repository other than GitHub (such as GitLab, BitBucket, AWS CodeCommit, Gitea) or if you don’t want a remote repo at all, simply make a local working copy of the example site directly using git clone. As last parameter, give your chosen local repo name (here: my-new-site):

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.14.3-dev https://github.com/google/docsy-example.git my-new-site

Option 2: Using the GitHub UI (local copy + associated GitHub repo)

As the Docsy example site repo is a template repository, creating your own remote GitHub clone of this Docsy example site repo is quite easy:

  1. Go to the repo of the Docsy example site.

  2. Use the dropdown for switching branches/tags to change to the latest released tag v0.14.3-dev.

  3. Click the button Use this template and select the option Create a new repository from the dropdown.

  4. Choose a name for your new repository (e.g. my-new-site) and type it in the Repository name field. You can also add an optional Description.

  5. Click Create repository from template to create your new repository. Congratulations, you just created your remote GitHub clone which now serves as starting point for your own site!

  6. Make a local copy of your newly created GitHub repository by using git clone, giving your repo’s web URL as last parameter.

    git clone https://github.com/me-at-github/my-new-site.git

Now you can make local edits and test your copied site locally with Hugo.

Preview your site

To build and preview your site locally, switch to the root of your cloned project and use hugo’s server command:

cd my-new-site
hugo server

Preview your site in your browser at: http://localhost:1313. Thanks to Hugo’s live preview, you can immediately see the effect of changes that you are making to the source files of your local repo. Use Ctrl + c to stop the Hugo server whenever you like. See the known issues on MacOS.

What’s next?

3 - Create a new site: Start a new site from scratch

Create a new Hugo site from scratch with Docsy as a Hugo Module

The simplest approach to creating a Docsy site is copying our example site. However, if you’re an experienced Hugo user or the site structure of our example site doesn’t meet your needs, you may prefer to create a new site from scratch. With this option, you’ll get Docsy look and feel, navigation, and other features, but you’ll need to specify your own site structure.

These instructions give you a minimum file structure for your site project only, so that you build and extend your actual site step by step. The first step is adding the Docsy theme as a Hugo Module to your site. If needed, you can easily update the module to the latest revision from the Docsy GitHub repo.

TL;DR: Setup for the impatient expert

At your command prompt, run the following:

hugo new site my-new-site
cd  my-new-site
hugo mod init github.com/me/my-new-site
hugo mod get github.com/google/docsy@v0.14.3-dev
cat >> hugo.toml <<EOL
[module]
proxy = "direct"
[[module.imports]]
path = "github.com/google/docsy"
EOL
hugo server
hugo new site my-new-site
cd  my-new-site
hugo mod init github.com/me/my-new-site
hugo mod get github.com/google/docsy@v0.14.3-dev
(echo [module]^

proxy = "direct"^

[[module.imports]]^

path = "github.com/google/docsy") >> hugo.toml
hugo server

You now can preview your new site inside your browser at http://localhost:1313.

Detailed Setup instructions

Specifying the Docsy theme as Hugo Module for your minimal site gives you all the theme-y goodness, but you’ll need to specify your own site structure.

Create your new skeleton project

To create a new Hugo site project and then add the Docsy theme as a Hugo module, run the following commands from your project’s root directory.

hugo new site my-new-site
cd  my-new-site

This will create a minimal site structure, containing the folders archetypes, content, data, layouts, static, and themes and a configuration file (default: hugo.toml).

Import the Docsy theme module as a dependency of your site

Only sites that are Hugo Modules themselves can import other modules. To turn your site into a Hugo Module, run the following commands in your newly created site directory:

hugo mod init github.com/me/my-new-site

This creates two new files, go.mod for the module definitions and go.sum which holds the checksums for module verification.

Next declare the Docsy theme module as a dependency for your site.

hugo mod get github.com/google/docsy@v0.14.3-dev

This command adds the docsy theme module to your definition file go.mod.

Add theme module configuration settings

Add the settings in the following snippet at the end of your site’s configuration file (default: hugo.toml) and save the file.

[module]
  proxy = "direct"
  # uncomment line below for temporary local development of module
  # replacements = "github.com/google/docsy -> ../../docsy"
  [module.hugoVersion]
    extended = true
    min = "0.155.3"
  [[module.imports]]
    path = "github.com/google/docsy"
    disable = false
module:
  proxy: direct
  hugoVersion:
    extended: true
    min: 0.155.3
  imports:
    - path: github.com/google/docsy
      disable: false
{
  "module": {
    "proxy": "direct",
    "hugoVersion": {
      "extended": true,
      "min": "0.155.3"
    },
    "imports": [
      {
        "path": "github.com/google/docsy",
        "disable": false
      }
    ]
  }
}

You can find details of what these configuration settings do in the Hugo modules documentation. Depending on your environment you may need to tweak them slightly, for example by adding a proxy to use when downloading remote modules.

Preview your site

To build and preview your site locally:

hugo server

By default, your site will be available at http://localhost:1313. When encountering problems, have a look at the known issues on MacOS.

You may get Hugo errors for missing parameters and values when you try to build your site. This is usually because you’re missing default values for some configuration settings that Docsy uses - once you add them your site should build correctly. You can find out how to add configuration in Basic site configuration - we recommend copying the example site configuration even if you’re creating a site from scratch as it provides defaults for many required configuration parameters.

What’s next?