Crafting and configuring a "serverless" site

tips & tricks
1

A couple of times each year someone expresses interest in creating a site that can be navigated via the file system. For example:

google-chrome public/en/index.html

Crafting and configuring a “serverless” site is not a trivial exercise for infrequent or casual users. Among other things, you need to:

  1. Set baseURL = "/" in site configuration
  2. Set uglyURLs = true in site configuration
  3. Set relativeURLs = true in site configuration
  4. Remove integrity attributes on link and script elements
  5. Enable Hugo’s embedded link and image render hooks

And the setup varies depending on the number of languages and hosts.

In my view, in the majority of cases, the effort required exceeds the value obtained, particularly if you are trying to modify an existing theme. Using Hugo’s built-in development server, or something like the Node.js serve package, is almost always a better choice than trying to build a “serverless” site.

Having said that, here are some simple examples of “serverless” sites:

Monolingual site 
git clone --single-branch -b hugo-forum-topic-48029-monolingual https://github.com/jmooring/hugo-testing hugo-forum-topic-48029-monolingual
cd hugo-forum-topic-48029-monolingual

# To build and view the site in "serverless" mode:
hugo -e serverless && google-chrome public/index.html 

# To build and view the site in "server" mode:
hugo server

# To build the production site:
hugo

Multilingual single-host site 
git clone --single-branch -b hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-single-host https://github.com/jmooring/hugo-testing hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-single-host
cd hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-single-host

# To build and view the site in "serverless" mode:
hugo -e serverless && google-chrome public/en/index.html 

# To build and view the site in "server" mode:
hugo server

# To build the production site:
hugo

Multilingual multi-host site 
git clone --single-branch -b hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-multi-host https://github.com/jmooring/hugo-testing hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-multi-host
cd hugo-forum-topic-48029-multilingual-multi-host

# To build and view the site in "serverless" mode:
hugo -e serverless && google-chrome public/en/index.html 

# To build and view the site in "server" mode:
hugo server

# To build the production site:
hugo
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