Best practices for naming variables etc

1

I’m new to Hugo and I’m wondering if there are some best practices / recommendations for naming variables etc.

Knowing Hugo itself uses e.g.:

.Site.BaseURL
.Site.Data
.Site.DisqusShortname

it seems to use PascalCase.

Is it recommended to follow up on that? e.g. using:

.Site.Data.Persons.Person123.Firstname

However looking at the frontmatter vars it seems camelCase:

draft: true
publishDate: 2020-05-10T18:00:15+02:00

I’m trying to to build my site with some consistency and I guess Hugo itself use some convention for PascalCase vs camelCase at different places?

2

The reason why the above looks like it does is because that is Go’s way of exporting fields/methods in a struct (BaseURL is a method, I think) – if if was camelCase, you would not see it.

My 50 cents on this is that I

  • Prefer camelCase
  • But for a new project, I wold probably recommend lower case snake_case.

You remove a whole giant set of potential upper/lower case issues by going the lower snake_case route.

1 Like
3

I second that_motion.

4

Thanks!

Interesting :slight_smile:

My json data files are indeed snake case as well.
But it felt quite inconsistent when doing something like:

---
engineManufacturerId: audi
---

{{ $engineManufacturer := index .Site.Data "engine-manufacturers" .Page.Params.engineManufacturerId }}

Full name: {{ $engineManufacturer.full_name }}

This way it’s quite a mix of namings :slight_smile:

Its a new project so I probably will follow your advise by using snake case like:

---
engine_manufacturer_id: audi
---

{{ $engine_manufacturer := index .Site.Data.engine_manufacturers .Page.Params.engine_manufacturer_id }}

Full name: {{ $engine_manufacturer.full_name }}

Then my own vars, data and other namings are consistent.
The only exception are then some hugo vars but I can live with that :slight_smile: