JSON as data for websites

support
1

Hello
I am Stefano from Italy and i am happy to be here
i have a stupid question about HUGO, because i need select a right static site generetor that fit for my needs, so i need optimize time to learn, in a nutshell i can’t waste my time to learn something not usefull.

Can HUGO generate static sites start from json file? I have an ecommerce catalog products on some JSON file.

thanks

2

Yes, local blobs and remotely.

3

Can HUGO generate static sites start from json file?

No. You would need to write a script to generate the content pages from the JSON file. Also, you can use JSON as page front matter, so you don’t have to convert to TOML or YAML.

A couple issues related to the pages from data feature request:

4

Some time ago I posted this technique about creating separate pages from a CSV file.

Here is the JSON variation:

Sample file contents of test.json that needs to reside under the assetDir

[
  {
    "filename": "foo",
    "title": "bar"
  }
]

Sample archetype that needs to be created in archetypes/test.md

{{- with resources.Get "test.json" -}}
{{- $content := .Content | transform.Unmarshal -}}
{{- range $content -}}
{{- if eq (getenv "HUGO_TITLE") .filename -}}
+++
title = "{{ .title }}"
{{- end -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- end }}
lastmod = "{{ dateFormat "Monday, Jan 2, 2006, 15:04:05 EEST" .Date }}"
+++

Sample CLI command that uses enviroment variables and outputs a markdown file if the environment variable HUGO_TITLE is present in the .filename value of a JSON object.

env HUGO_TITLE="foo" hugo new "test/foo.md"

End result of foo.md

+++
title = "bar"
lastmod = "Thursday, Apr 2, 2020, 13:52:51 EEST"
+++

So until the aforementioned GitHub issues are resolved this is the best way to create pages from data files in Hugo without external scripts.

5

Hi there,
since there seems to still be no real solution I created a shell script with help of @alexandros … Maybe helps someone else trying to create several contentfiles from json…

#!/bin/bash

# You have to have jq installed locally for it to work

IFS=$'\n' # Each iteration of the for loop should read until we find an end-of-line

jq -c '.[]' ./assets/data/data.json | while read item; do
  dataName=$(jq -r '.dataName' <<< "$item")
  dataFolder=$(jq -r '.dataFolder' <<< "$item")
  if ! [ -z "$dataFolder" ]
  then
    dataFolderLower="$(tr [A-Z] [a-z] <<< "$dataFolder")"
    dataNameLower="$(tr [A-Z] [a-z] <<< "$dataName")"

    data123=$(jq -r '.data123' <<< "$item")
    data456=$(jq -r '.data456' <<< "$item")

    env HUGO_TITLE=${dataName} HUGO_DATA_123="${data123}" HUGO_DATA_456="${data456}" hugo new "test/${dataFolderLower}/${dataNameLower}.md"
  fi
done

unset IFS # Return IFS to its original value

… Something like this when working with custom subfolders as in my case…
Greetings :slight_smile: