Dynamically override lastmod for selected page

support
1

Is there way to dynamically override lastmod for selected page?

I’d want to use build time as lastmod for main page and some other pages and usual lastmod from gitinfo as in config.yaml for all other pages.

2

You can do this with front matter
Front matter | Hugo (gohugo.io)

AND check Hugo config
Configure Hugo | Hugo (gohugo.io)

3

But how to set different frontmatter settings for different pages?

Or how to have global frontmatter settings in config and override it for specific page in yaml frontmatter section?

4

I assume the “build time” should be the date you run hugo and injecting that to a frontmatter or site param would mean to patch all affected files before generating…

I would go with adjusting the code that adds your lastmod to the page and do something like that

define Environment variable for BUILD Date when starting Hugo

maybe one is already defined in your CI and whitelisted by hugo (see os.Getenv | Hugo)

HUGO_BUILD_DATE="my date in proper Go format" hugo

add a flag to the pages (*.md) that need to use build date

+++
[params]
  useBuildDate =  true
+++

query the param in your template

{{- if .Params.useBuildDate -}}
   {{- envvar "HUGO_BUILD_DATE" -}}
{{- else -}}
  {{- .lastmod -}}
{{- end -}}
5

That’s good for template, but I’m also have rss, index.xml, some sorting on list pages based on lastmod, so I think I need really to override lastmod settings for some pages, otherwise I would have to rewrite all system templates and it will not be easy to support all this.

I thought about something like sed with manually set lastmod for specific pages before hugo build but it more like a hack, I hope to find better way for this.

6

and finally made it

[[cascade]]
   builddate = 2003-10-01T00:40:04-07:00
   [cascade._target]
      path = '/about**'

[frontmatter]
   lastmod = ['builddate', ':git', 'lastmod', 'modified', 'date', 'publishdate', 'pubdate', 'published']

with that calling page.Lastmod on the about page will return the builddate - other pages will use date from git or set values for lastmod, …

one could extract the cascade part to a separate config file and call hugo --config builddate.toml,hugo.toml …

7

you can put the first 2 lines in in content/about/index.md