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Upgrading a Hugo Website from 0.27 to 0.44

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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!

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