I know that Hugo is a static site generator, enabling me to host it on services on Netlify etc, but can I use the Hugo server to serve the files in production?
When I start the server on my home computer, it says ‘development’ for environment. Is there information available about how to use the Hugo server in production?
Sorry, I see there have been posts about this topic already.
Hopefully they all say, “Don’t do that.” 
What you should do is setup apache2 or nginx (seems to be preferred by many personal site owners now), and use that to host a copy of what hugo spits out in the public folder by default.
I followed Luke Smith’s (also in collab with his community) guides on landchad.net, the one linked below goes to the nginx specific guide.