Why is Hugo serving blank pages?

I ran into the same issue after following the hugo getting-started / quickstart guide but instead of using an existing theme i created a very basic theme:

  1. Install hugo i picked install hugo on windows
  2. Create a New Site hugo new site quickstart
  3. Add a Theme
    • cloning a theme (for example the ananke-theme ) is easier <-- this is what the quickstart does and what i left out
    • instead you can create a theme with hugo new theme [your-theme-name] which adds a theme skeleton inside your site-folder for example C:\Hugo\Sites\example.com (see the screenshot)
  4. Add Some Content hugo new posts/my-first-post.md
  5. Start the server hugo server -D --watch --verbose

Hugo_myFirstTheme_files_folders

After you created a theme files and folders should be under Sites/example.com/themes/your-theme-name/. Since most of the generated files are (nearly) empty you have to edit a few of them before the quickstart sample is working.

Based on develop a Theme for Hugo i edited /themes/your-theme-name/layouts/index.html 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html> <body>    
    {{ range first 10 .Data.Pages }}        
         <h1>{{ .Title }}</h1>
         <div>{{- .Content -}}</div>
    {{ end }}      
</body> </html>

Basic information about hugo taken from develop a Theme for Hugo

  • Hugo configuration files (TOML, YAML or JSON) are located in the root of your site
  • Hugo default: Markdown inside content/,
    • content files contain metadata (frontmatter) and text (/markdown) --> html to public/,
    • example frontmatter attributes: date, title, description, categories, tags

  • templates under themes/ (or layouts/)

    • three types of templates: single, list, partials
    • theme templates under /themes/your-theme-name/ and then under /layouts/ for index.html and under /layouts/_default/list.html and /layouts/_default/single.html

  • HTML files will be written to the public/ directory.

You may want to read the hugo theme documentation.


The problem is likely to be the theme - it is either missing or broken. Hugo does not come with any default/fallback theme if you fail to provide a working one.

Debugging guide:

  1. Check the themes folder, and follow the quickstart.
  2. Try using another, simpler theme.
  3. It may only be a question of configuring the theme, you may read the hugo theme documentation too.

Please verify your config.toml file points to right theme.

If following Quick start tutorial, you might have forgot to run

echo 'theme = "ananke"' >> config.toml

I had the same problem when I cloned my blog from Github but didn't include themes submodules. Including submodules solved my problem:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/username/your-blog

Tags:

Hugo

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