While that is true for when you’re doing “theme development”, once it is stable you can do “hugo mod vendor”.
We do that for the Hugo Docs and the Hugo Themes site (we only have one module there, the theme, but the concept is valid), which give us 2 benefits:
- Users who want to run the docs site locally only need Hugo installed (no Git, no Go)
- The repo has everything needed to run the site committed to GitHub – meaning we can include the full docs site source (with theme etc.) in the /docs folder of the Hugo main project in the source distribution. Meaning you can the download v0.56 source and browse the docs at that point, without having to download anything more.