Guys im really new to using hugo.
I want to generate the site and put it under nginx, but whenever I use the hugo command to generate the public folder, The finished product is never the same as the live server page. There is no content folder inside public director and the html is different from the live server
You need to share the site source, or at least a dummy version of that which demonstrates the same problem. And then explain in detail the issue you are facing and how to recreate it.
If by “content folder” you mean the content folder under your hugo project folder, that is an “input” folder where your content files like markdown files live, and does not get copied to public.
A couple of points -
hugo server does not generate any files on disk by default (it serves from memory), but you can use a switch to make it do that (do hugo server --help and search for --renderToDisk).hugo with switches is the command people use to generate the content prior to uploading public to their web server for serving (do hugo --help).