Install and Use Themes

Assumptions

1. You have already installed Hugo on your development machine.
2. You have git installed on your machine and you are familiar with basic git usage.

Install Themes

The community-contributed themes featured on themes.gohugo.io are hosted in a centralized GitHub repository. The Hugo Themes Repo at https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemes is really a meta repository that contains pointers to a set of contributed themes.

Install All Themes

You can install all available Hugo themes by cloning the entire Hugo Theme repository on GitHub from within your working directory. Depending on your internet connection the download of all themes might take a while.

git clone --depth 1 --recursive https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoThemes.git themes

Before you use a theme, remove the .git folder in that theme’s root folder. Otherwise, this will cause problem if you deploy using Git.

Install a Single Theme

Change into the themes directory and download a theme by replacing URL_TO_THEME with the URL of the theme repository:

cd themes
git clone URL_TO_THEME

The following example shows how to use the “Hyde” theme, which has its source hosted at https://github.com/spf13/hyde:

cd themes
git clone https://github.com/spf13/hyde

Alternatively, you can download the theme as a .zip file, unzip the theme contents, and then move the unzipped source into your themes directory.

Theme Placement

Please make certain you have installed the themes you want to use in the /themes directory. This is the default directory used by Hugo. Hugo comes with the ability to change the themes directory via the themesDir variable in your site configuration, but this is not recommended.

Use Themes

Hugo applies the decided theme first and then applies anything that is in the local directory. This allows for easier customization while retaining compatibility with the upstream version of the theme. To learn more, go to customizing themes.

Command Line

There are two different approaches to using a theme with your Hugo website: via the Hugo CLI or as part of your site configuration file.

To change a theme via the Hugo CLI, you can pass the -t flag when building your site:

hugo -t themename

Likely, you will want to add the theme when running the Hugo local server, especially if you are going to customize the theme:

hugo server -t themename

config File

If you’ve already decided on the theme for your site and do not want to fiddle with the command line, you can add the theme directly to your site configuration file:

theme: themename