This website is powered by Hugo - a static site generator written in Go. I’ve written about it before and really enjoy using it. Using Hugo, I’ve removed all the obstacles from getting content out there - now it’s just my own laziness in the way…

For years, I’ve had a Jenkins job that builds the site, uploads it to S3 and creates a CloudFront cache invalidation every time the Git repo changes. This all works great, but I haven’t updated the version of the hugo binary in my Jenkins docker image since v0.27.1. The latest version (at time of writing) is v0.44 so I figured I’d just try the new version and see what happens! Will my custom theme make it?

Things broke!

Here’s how I fixed them!

Use partial instead of template

The old advice for including other partials in pages was to use the template keyword. I had this sort of thing in my main single.html:

{{ template "theme/partials/singlehead.html" . }}
    <body>
        {{ template "theme/partials/singleheader.html" . }}

THis makes Hugo error out with an error like: Partial "theme/partials/singleheader.html" not found. According to the docs, we don’t use template any more and just use partial instead with shortened paths:

{{ partial "singlehead.html" . }}
    <body>
        {{ partial "singleheader.html" . }}

I had this issue across a ton of other themes files too, but now my custom theme is good to go on v0.44.

Syntax highlighting

Hugo has switched from pygments to Chroma which is fine, but it seems like the config.toml file has gotten a bit more picky.

I had

pygmentsstyle = "github"

Which was no longer working (it was using the default theme). I changed it to pygmentsStyle (with capital S) and now it’s good!

I also learned about pygmentsCodeFences setting which lets you use normal (and portable) markdown code fences with a specified language instead of Hugo’s shortcodes. I also changed from the pygments “github” style to the Chroma “manni” style!

Hopefully this can help someone else doing this big of a version jump with their own site!