How to investigate hugo server displaying black error page

support
1

Hi,
I’ve been sticking to an old version(v0.91.2) of Hugo and decided to update to the latest version (v0.115.1) but as I could expect, my theme got obsolete (hugo-future-imperfect-slim), I had to patch a couple of things, and eventually it seems to build apparently to completion, but the local server only renders a black page showing

hugo v0.115.1-857374e69358f788bd31ddc55255c5c8e3dcfd80+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2023-07-03T17:28:25Z VendorInfo=gohugoio
Reload Page

I tried almost all the possible parameters of the hugo server command , but I can’t figure out how to investigate this issue, no log or trace of error or anything being output from that web server.

Here are the outputs of my hugo server command:

$ hugo server  -D
Start building sites …
hugo v0.115.1-857374e69358f788bd31ddc55255c5c8e3dcfd80+extended windows/amd64 BuildDate=2023-07-03T17:28:25Z VendorInfo=gohugoio

WARN  .Author is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use taxonomies.
ERROR .Authors is deprecated and will be removed in Hugo 0.116.0. Use taxonomies.

                   |  FR  |  EN
-------------------+------+-------
  Pages            |  298 |  298
  Paginator pages  |    4 |    4
  Non-page files   | 3099 | 3099
  Static files     | 2006 | 2006
  Processed images |    0 |    0
  Aliases          |   36 |   35
  Sitemaps         |    2 |    1
  Cleaned          |    0 |    0

Built in 1676 ms
Watching for changes in D:\Documents Tribue\Christophe\Developpements\www\Hugo\Sites\LaBelleNote\{archetypes,content,data,i18n,layouts,static,themes}
Watching for config changes in D:\Documents Tribue\Christophe\Developpements\www\Hugo\Sites\LaBelleNote\hugo.toml
Environment: "development"
Serving pages from memory
Running in Fast Render Mode. For full rebuilds on change: hugo server --disableFastRender
Web Server is available at http://localhost:1313/ (bind address 127.0.0.1)
Press Ctrl+C to stop

What I did is I built the site with hugo and tried another local Web server (Windows IIS).
Well the result is not pretty at all, but at least the site is rendered (from the public folder)
How could I proceed to debug this black page issue ?
Thanks !
Christophe

2

Up up, no one can help ?

4

I don’t know what more info you want, but my question is quite simple, I don’t expect someone to debug my code, I just asked about how to investigate a situation where hugo server renders nothing at all, I mean what are the possible logs, traces, anything I could add or get to have a beginning of a clue ?

For now I’m trying to narrow down by removing pieces from the theme, it looks like it’s in the head template, so I willl probably end up finding something by try and fail.

But isn’t there something more straightforward to investigate such issues ?

5 
WARN  .Author is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use taxonomies.
ERROR .Authors is deprecated and will be removed in Hugo 0.116.0. Use taxonomies.

Search your templates for .Author

You’ll find this:
https://github.com/pacollins/hugo-future-imperfect-slim/blob/master/layouts/partials/head.html#L58

And that’s the problem. Comment out that line[1] and then you can track down all of the other errors. Or you could use an actively maintained theme.

  1. This removes the error, but probably breaks the “author” functionality in the theme. ↩︎

6

Thanks a lot Jmooring, I ended up to the same piece of code in the head template.

But, don’t you feel it would be so much easy and would avoid questions if the server said it cannot render because of that…

I did notice the WARN/ERR in the console, but as the build went to completion and the server started, I did not believe that was the root cause and I was looking for something else.

Just comment about ‘use an actively maintained theme’.
The thing is I invested hundreds of hours two years ago at porting my old site to the Hugo platform, I can not invest so much time at maintaining the site . Sadly I picked a nice theme that got archived, well, I will have to maintain my copy by myself… The site is too dependent on the theme to change simply with another one.

The perspective of a user is quite different as the one of the framework provider:
I’m basically a maker and I only wish to spend time at creating content, not just redoing everything at each and every software update.

That being said, I also am a professional software designer and I can understand the necessity of change, but if I may provide the user feedback here : think about compatibility and data retrofit to ease the life of simple users

Thanks a lot anyway to the team, this project is really amazing :slight_smile: