Struggling to get 'hello world' site to work

support
1

I’ve followed the Quick Start guide and run:

hugo new site hugotest
cd hugotest
git init
mkdir themes
cd themes
git submodule add https://github.com/halogenica/beautifulhugo.git beautifulhugo

Now, following the Homepage Template doc, I’ve created the file content/_index.md with the following contents:

Hello, world

I’ve started Hugo by running:

hugo server -D

and browsed to http://localhost:1313, but there’s nothing there.

I tried adding a layouts/index.html file as described in the Homepage Template doc, but that made no difference. What am I doing wrong?

Here’s my site:

2

Your content/_index.md has no front matter. At minimum, you at least need empty front matter. So try something like this:

---
---

Hello, world!

Update: Well, nevermind, I just tested this, and looks like you can indeed have markdown content with no front matter.

3

Assuming you’re back at the root of your site and you’ve updated your content/_index.md as zwbetz suggested, can you try hugo server -t beautifulhugo to use the theme you installed?

1 Like
4

Yep @bitfield, you didn’t specify your theme. So as @michael_henderson mentioned, specify it through command line, or in your config.toml like so:

theme = "beautifulhugo"
5

You may want to try zwbetz’s excellent tutorial.

And Mike Dane’s Youtube series for a quick start.