Hugo server doesn't serve until I save file? (Debugging difficulties)

support
1

I’m having difficulties setting up my theme, because hugo server jumps between serving and not-serving files.

Right now when I start it, it serves a blank, or rather a <pre></pre> response. When I save a file, e.g. in the content tree (without changing it) and refresh the page, Hugo registers the event and serves again.

Is there some way I can get more information out of Hugo? The --verbose flag is not more informative. I also tried --gc in case some cruft was left in the pipeline.

2

Hi there,

Do you have your code somewhere we can have a look at? There may be something wrong with your layouts or how your site is configured.

3

Here’s my basic layout, maybe some obvious mistake jumps out at you?

├── config.toml
├── content
│   ├── index.md
│   ├── events
│   │   ├── apple.md     ← "saving" these makes hugo serve /events/ again
│   │   ├── orange.md
│   │   └── banana.md
│   ├── gallery
│   │   └── index.md
│   └── projects
│       └── index.md
├── static
│   └── …
├── themes
│   └── foobar
│       ├── assets
│       │   └── scss
│       │       └── _index.scss
│       ├── layouts
│       │   ├── 404.html
│       │   ├── _default
│       │   │   ├── baseof.html    ← base template
│       │   │   └── single.html
│       │   ├── events
│       │   │   └── list.html      ← also extends from base template (problem?)
│       │   └── partials
│       │       └── …
│       └── static
│           └── …
└── …

I can try to create a sample later if necessary, I hope I can reproduce the issue. Thanks.

4 
├── content
│   ├── index.md

This should be _index.md

...
├── themes
│   └── foobar
│       ├── layouts
│       │   ├── 404.html
│       │   ├── _default
│       │   │   ├── baseof.html    ← base template
│       │   │   └── single.html
│       │   ├── events
│       │   │   └── list.html      ← also extends from base template (problem?)

You don’t have a default list.html template.

5

This should be _index.md

But that’s my homepage (not a list page), shouldn’t it stay as is?

You don’t have a default list.html template.

Yeah, I won’t have any list pages aside from /events/, so I’m keeping the layout as sparse as possible to avoid confusion/duplication. Hugo doesn’t seem to look for a default list template in this arrangement.

What I did notice now is that Hugo doesn’t see my files until I save them! So it returns blanks because it thinks /content/events/ is empty!

I rebooted in-between so this doesn’t appear to be some synchronization issue with my text editor. The project is located in a regular filesystem along with my OS, nothing unusual. Weird!

Edit: Someone stumbled upon the same problem it seems.

6

I’ve filed an issue on GitHub. Maybe I’m just doing something wrong, but it’s not obvious from the documentation, so either way something insightful should come of this.

7

Ok, here’s what I found out:

The odd behavior was caused by having /content/index.md instead of /content/_index.md as pointyfar pointed out. For me the former worked (misleading!) and the latter didn’t because I had

disableKinds = ["home", …]

in my config.yaml, thinking it would just disable the need for a dedicated homepage template, not the rendering of that page per se.

So the solution is:

  • Don’t disable homepage kind
  • Rename homepage to /content/_index.md
  • (Add homepage template)

Now Hugo sees items under the /content/events/ section just fine without the shenanigans described in my first post. “Debugging difficulties” indeed :sweat_smile: