Adding a theme as a submodule or clone?

support
1

In https://gohugo.io/themes/installing-and-using-themes/ it is suggested to add them with git clone:

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

While in https://gohugo.io/getting-started/quick-start/#step-3-add-a-theme it uses git submodule:

git submodule add https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke;\

What are the pros and cons of each method or what has been your experience with using each of them?

2

There is a third option (as seen in https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoDocs/tree/master/themes/gohugoioTheme), which is a git subtree …

Which I guess makes the confusion complete, I guess …

I would say this:but

Submodules is, in most cases, your best choice. You can easily pull in updated theme(s) when needed.

Assuming your project is already a git project, then git clone sounds a little weird, and we should probably fix that. It may be a good option if your site isn’t a Git project. I.e. git clone some theme and then delete .git folder. Maybe also if you plan to use a theme as a starting point and never intend to synch in changes from the source.

The reasons why we use sub tree in the docs site is mainly:

  • We have a “mirror” of the docs in the main Hugo project (below /docs), so /docs is a subtree with the theme as another subtree …
  • Ready to build (hugo server) documentation is with this automatically packaged as part of the source distribution when we release, including theme and all.
  • We can also add documentation changes as part of the code changes in the same PRs if we need to.
3

I’m just starting out with Hugo and read the quickstart and then theme docs, was a bit confused about which is the best path to follow, so would probably help beginners to have it consistent in documentation :slight_smile:

thanks for detailed answer :slightly_smiling_face:

4

Maybe this isn’t the best place to ask, but after applying “git submodule add https://github.com/budparr/gohugo-theme-ananke.git themes/ananke;” my cmd just hangs. Am I missing something here?

5

Leave off the semicolon?

6

Yeah, I don’t have the semicolon, tried that the first time.