# Do you need to know Golang to use Hugo?

**URL:** <https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/do-you-need-to-know-golang-to-use-hugo/2346>\
**Category:** support\
**Created:** [December 26, 2015, 10:59pm UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/do-you-need-to-know-golang-to-use-hugo/2346 "2015-12-26T22:59:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![chreliot](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex036/user_avatar/discourse.gohugo.io/chreliot/32/488_2.png) [@chreliot](https://discourse.gohugo.io/u/chreliot)\
**Post date:** [December 28, 2015, 2:51pm UTC](https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/do-you-need-to-know-golang-to-use-hugo/2346/3 "2015-12-28T14:51:44Z")

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There are two answers, depending on what "take full advantage” means for you:

First: No, I didn’t learn a whiff of Go, and I love using Hugo for a blog. I use one of the pre-existing themes, so I didn’t do any design work. The things I needed to know were:

1. how to use basic Git functions with GitHub from the command-line;
2. how to edit a YAML or TOML template (or JSON) to plug in my metadata. I didn’t know this in advance, but is pretty obvious when you look at the examples;
3. how to write Markdown;
4. given how I chose to deploy, how to down download and install a script. Using the `deploy.sh` script seemed to me the fastest way to deploy my site. Putting my site online requires just the commands `hugo -d dist` and `./deploy.sh`, as described [here](https://gohugo.io/tutorials/github-pages-blog/#deploy-sh:fcefb200141ace3e7bfd6542457b7a72).

That’s all the technical knowledge required to use Hugo. No Go.

Second answer: if you’re designing a business site, you may want to edit or design your own theme, and to take full advantage of Hugo in that sense, you’d need to learn Go. Go is [required for theme design](https://gohugo.io/themes/creation/).

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