VARIABLES AND PARAMS

Page Variables

The following is a list of page-level variables. Many of these will be defined in the front matter, derived from file location, or extracted from the content itself.

Page Variables

.AlternativeOutputFormats
contains all alternative formats for a given page; this variable is especially useful link rel list in your site’s <head>. (See Output Formats.)
.Aliases
aliases of this page
.Content
the content itself, defined below the front matter.
.Data
the data specific to this type of page.
.Date
the date associated with the page; .Date pulls from the date field in a content’s front matter. See also .ExpiryDate, .PublishDate, and .Lastmod.
.Description
the description for the page.
.Dir
the path of the folder containing this content file. The path is relative to the content folder.
.Draft
a boolean, true if the content is marked as a draft in the front matter.
.ExpiryDate
the date on which the content is scheduled to expire; .ExpiryDate pulls from the expirydate field in a content’s front matter. See also .PublishDate, .Date, and .Lastmod.
.File
filesystem-related data for this content file. See also File Variables.
.FuzzyWordCount
the approximate number of words in the content.
.Hugo
see Hugo Variables.
.IsHome
true in the context of the homepage.
.IsNode
always false for regular content pages.
.IsPage
always true for regular content pages.
.IsTranslated
true if there are translations to display.
.Keywords
the meta keywords for the content.
.Kind
the page’s kind. Possible return values are page, home, section, taxonomy, or taxonomyTerm. Note that there are also RSS, sitemap, robotsTXT, and 404 kinds, but these are only available during the rendering of each of these respective page’s kind and therefore not available in any of the Pages collections.
.Language
a language object that points to the language’s definition in the site config. .Language.Lang gives you the language code.
.Lastmod
the date the content was last modified. .Lastmod pulls from the lastmod field in a content’s front matter.
  • If lastmod is not set, and .GitInfo feature is disabled, the front matter date field will be used.
  • If lastmod is not set, and .GitInfo feature is enabled, .GitInfo.AuthorDate will be used instead.

See also .ExpiryDate, .Date, .PublishDate, and .GitInfo.

.LinkTitle
access when creating links to the content. If set, Hugo will use the linktitle from the front matter before title.
.Next
Points up to the next regular page (sorted by Hugo’s default sort). Example: {{with .Next}}{{.Permalink}}{{end}}. Calling .Next from the first page returns nil.
.NextInSection
Points up to the next regular page below the same top level section (e.g. in /blog)). Pages are sorted by Hugo’s default sort. Example: {{with .NextInSection}}{{.Permalink}}{{end}}. Calling .NextInSection from the first page returns nil.
.OutputFormats
contains all formats, including the current format, for a given page. Can be combined the with .Get function to grab a specific format. (See Output Formats.)
.Pages
a collection of associated pages. This value will be nil within the context of regular content pages. See .Pages.
.Permalink
the Permanent link for this page; see Permalinks
.Plain
the Page content stripped of HTML tags and presented as a string.
.PlainWords
the Page content stripped of HTML as a []string using Go’s strings.Fields to split .Plain into a slice.
.Prev
Points down to the previous regular page (sorted by Hugo’s default sort). Example: {{if .PrevPage}}{{.PrevPage.Permalink}}{{end}}. Calling .Prev from the last page returns nil.
.PrevInSection
Points down to the previous regular page below the same top level section (e.g. /blog). Pages are sorted by Hugo’s default sort. Example: {{if .PrevInSection}}{{.PrevInSection.Permalink}}{{end}}. Calling .PrevInSection from the last page returns nil.
.PublishDate
the date on which the content was or will be published; .Publishdate pulls from the publishdate field in a content’s front matter. See also .ExpiryDate, .Date, and .Lastmod.
.RSSLink (deprecated)
link to the page’s RSS feed. This is deprecated. You should instead do something like this: {{ with .OutputFormats.Get "RSS" }}{{ .RelPermalink }}{{ end }}.
.RawContent
raw markdown content without the front matter. Useful with remarkjs.com
.ReadingTime
the estimated time, in minutes, it takes to read the content.
.Resources
resources such as images and CSS that are associated with this page
.Ref
returns the permalink for a given reference (e.g., .Ref "sample.md"). .Ref does not handle in-page fragments correctly. See Cross References.
.RelPermalink
the relative permanent link for this page.
.RelRef
returns the relative permalink for a given reference (e.g., RelRef "sample.md"). .RelRef does not handle in-page fragments correctly. See Cross References.
.Site
see Site Variables.
.Sites
returns all sites (languages). A typical use case would be to link back to the main language: <a href="{{ .Sites.First.Home.RelPermalink }}">...</a>.
.Sites.First
returns the site for the first language. If this is not a multilingual setup, it will return itself.
.Summary
a generated summary of the content for easily showing a snippet in a summary view. The breakpoint can be set manually by inserting <!--more--> at the appropriate place in the content page, or the summary can be written independent of the page text. See Content Summaries for more details.
.TableOfContents
the rendered table of contents for the page.
.Title
the title for this page.
.Translations
a list of translated versions of the current page. See Multilingual Mode for more information.
.TranslationKey
the key used to map language translations of the current page. See Multilingual Mode for more information.
.Truncated
a boolean, true if the .Summary is truncated. Useful for showing a “Read more…” link only when necessary. See Summaries for more information.
.Type
the content type of the content (e.g., posts).
.UniqueID
the MD5-checksum of the content file’s path.
.Weight
assigned weight (in the front matter) to this content, used in sorting.
.WordCount
the number of words in the content.

Section Variables and Methods

Also see Sections.

.CurrentSection
The page’s current section. The value can be the page itself if it is a section or the homepage.
.FirstSection
The page’s first section below root, e.g. /docs, /blog etc.
.InSection $anotherPage
Whether the given page is in the current section.
.IsAncestor $anotherPage
Whether the current page is an ancestor of the given page.
.IsDescendant $anotherPage
Whether the current page is a descendant of the given page.
.Parent
A section’s parent section or a page’s section.
.Section
The section this content belongs to. Note: For nested sections, this is the first path element in the directory, for example, /blog/funny/mypost/ => blog.
.Sections
The sections below this content.

The .Pages Variable

.Pages is an alias to .Data.Pages. It is conventional to use the aliased form .Pages.

.Pages compared to .Site.Pages

  • A regular page is a “post” page or a “content” page.
    • A leaf bundle is a regular page.
  • A list page can list regular pages and other list pages. Some examples are: homepage, section pages, taxonomy term (/tags/) and taxonomy (/tags/foo/) pages.
    • A branch bundle is a list page.
.Site.Pages
Collection of all pages of the site: regular pages, sections, taxonomies, etc. – Superset of everything!
.Site.RegularPages
Collection of only regular pages.

The above .Site. .. page collections can be accessed from any scope in the templates.

Below variables return a collection of pages only from the scope of the current list page:

.Pages
Collection of regular pages and only first-level section pages under the current list page.
.RegularPages
Collection of only regular pages under the current list page.
Note
From the scope of regular pages, .Pages and .RegularPages return an empty slice.

Page-level Params

Any other value defined in the front matter in a content file, including taxonomies, will be made available as part of the .Params variable.

---
title: My First Post
date: 2017-02-20T15:26:23-06:00
categories: [one]
tags: [two,three,four]

With the above front matter, the tags and categories taxonomies are accessible via the following:

  • .Params.tags
  • .Params.categories

The .Params variable is particularly useful for the introduction of user-defined front matter fields in content files. For example, a Hugo website on book reviews could have the following front matter in /content/review/book01.md:

---
...
affiliatelink: "http://www.my-book-link.here"
recommendedby: "My Mother"
...
---

These fields would then be accessible to the /themes/yourtheme/layouts/review/single.html template through .Params.affiliatelink and .Params.recommendedby, respectively.

Two common situations where this type of front matter field could be introduced is as a value of a certain attribute like href="" or by itself to be displayed as text to the website’s visitors.

/themes/yourtheme/layouts/review/single.html

<h3><a href={{ printf "%s" $.Params.affiliatelink }}>Buy this book</a></h3>
<p>It was recommended by {{ .Params.recommendedby }}.</p>

This template would render as follows, assuming you’ve set uglyURLs to false in your site config:

yourbaseurl/review/book01/index.html

<h3><a href="http://www.my-book-link.here">Buy this book</a></h3>
<p>It was recommended by my Mother.</p>

The .Param Method

In Hugo, you can declare params in individual pages and globally for your entire website. A common use case is to have a general value for the site param and a more specific value for some of the pages (i.e., a header image):

{{ $.Param "header_image" }}

The .Param method provides a way to resolve a single value according to it’s definition in a page parameter (i.e. in the content’s front matter) or a site parameter (i.e., in your config).

Access Nested Fields in Front Matter

When front matter contains nested fields like the following:

---
author:
  given_name: John
  family_name: Feminella
  display_name: John Feminella
---

.Param can access these fields by concatenating the field names together with a dot:

{{ $.Param "author.display_name" }}

If your front matter contains a top-level key that is ambiguous with a nested key, as in the following case:

---
favorites.flavor: vanilla
favorites:
  flavor: chocolate
---

The top-level key will be preferred. Therefore, the following method, when applied to the previous example, will print vanilla and not chocolate:

{{ $.Param "favorites.flavor" }}
=> vanilla

See Also

“Page Variables” was last updated: March 23, 2020: first commit (affc25d)
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