Automatically add _index.md to new subsections

support
1

I’ve been reading through the content types and archetypes documentation and wonder if it’s possible to have Hugo create a new _index.md file for new subsections? An example may help:

In my content directory, I have a blog section. Blogs are organised in subsections of year and again of month. This gives a tree that looks a bit like this:

./content/blog/
├── 2017
│   ├── 10
│   │   └── test-3.md
│   ├── 11
│   │   ├── test-1.md
│   │   └── test-2.md
│   ├── 12
│   │   ├── _index.md
│   │   └── automating-hugo-deployment-to-digitalocean-with-codeship.md
│   ├── 6
│   │   └── test-10.md
│   ├── 7
│   │   └── test-9.md
│   ├── 8
│   │   ├── test-7.md
│   │   └── test-8.md
│   └── 9
│       ├── test-4.md
│       ├── test-5.md
│       └── test-6.md
└── _index.md

Given that each month, and each new year, a new directory is created and should have an _index.md with pre-populated front matter, is it possible for Hugo to generate this?

Using the above tree as an example, suppose now we are in 2018 I create a new blog hugo new blog/2018/1/some-post.md, can Hugo be configured to create _index.md in both the 2018 and 1 directories? And then in February, when I do hugo new blog/2018/2/some_other-post.md, create _index.md in 2? And so on?

If so, how would I do this?

2

To your concrete question the answer is: No.

But I would recommend you look into Hugo’s permalink settings instead of manually creating that “monthly file structure”.

3

Thanks, @bep. Useful to know both of those.

Having implemented the latter, I have 2 questions:

  1. Is it possible to generate a list of items that fall under localhost:1313/2017/10, or /2017, or /2018, etc? Or is the answer still no?

  2. Previously, when I had the link as /blog/2017/12, I had a blog menu item that was highlighted whenever anything under /blog was the current page. This no longer works. How should I adapt the following snippet to provide this same functionality?

{{ $currentPage := . }}
{{ range .Site.Menus.main }}
   <li class='menu-item{{if or ($currentPage.IsMenuCurrent "main" .) ($currentPage.HasMenuCurrent "main" .) }} current-menu-item{{end}}'>
   <a title="{{ .Name }}" href="{{ .URL }}">{{ .Name }}</a>
  </li>
{{ end }}

Second point slightly off-topic, I know - happy to move to another conversation if need be.

4
  1. Yes, but you need to manually (or create a script yourself) that creates “_index.md” in the bottom-most folders.
5

So if I script that, I’m trying to understand the steps involved. As I see it, it would be:

  1. Loop through all posts and read the date of each.
  2. For each distinct year, create a folder for that year.
  3. For each folder created, create an _index.md file.
  4. Run hugo, which will merge the created folders with the generated folder structure, which will then additionally include list pages for each of the years.

Is that correct?

6

You will have to come up the script yourself (this is not some corporate support), but as I said: You need to create the file at the lowest level (which I guess is the month); the content of that file does not matter too much for this (you would probably want a date) as long as it is a valid content file with front matter.

7

And here I was hoping I’d found some free corporate support! It is a support forum :wink:

Just trying to make sure I understand the problem and approach to solving it in the context of Hugo.