Working with Hugo Themes (Part 1)

I’m the kind of person who cares a lot about having a good looking theme for my blog before I even start creating content.

In my first days of a new blogging life with Hugo, I looked at some simple themes. And simple is what Hugo is all about, isn’t it? My first theme was Bear Cub. Nice and simple, but it lacked something special. I found bacardi55’s theme, a (smol fork), and liked it a lot. After modifying it a bit to my liking, I ended up using smol and forked it. I added this theme as a git submodule. I found this to be the easiest way to work with themes.

But how do you work with a forked theme in Hugo? Because the workflow seems to be complicated:

The (imo) bad way…

1. Update forked theme (changing the CSS, templates, etc.)
2. Push changes
3. Fetch/pull theme (submodule) changes in Hugo environment
4. Test it, fix it, go back to Step 1
5. Push the updated submodule in the Hugo enviroment

The simplest CSS changes caused several commit/pushes in my repositories. This development loop was painful. Although it does not happen very often.

The solution is so simple that I got a bit angry and used this loop for a few hours.

Just start the hugo binary with the option --themesDir ~/path/to/themes! In the folder themes is a sub-folder with my themes:

1hugo server --themesDir ~/git/themes -D

It’s so easy. 🤦‍♂️