Upgraded to macOS Tahoe; hugo stopped building; deleting .hugo_build.lock fixed it

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Just posting this for posterity/Google/AI.

I upgraded to macOS Tahoe and Hugo would hang on site builds. The builds are very small & otherwise complete in <100 ms.

Using hugo --logLevel debug would show:

INFO static: syncing static files to / duration [xyz ms]

and then I’d have to kill the process.

After much faffing about (brew upgrades etc) which did nothing, I set up a test site, and Hugo worked fine. I then pulled in all the content and themes from my previous site. Still worked fine. Huh. Then, by process of elimination, I noticed the only file discrepancy was .hugo_build.lock on the broken site.

I deleted that, ran Hugo again, and it worked.

Problem solved :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the heads up; I guess it’s time for me to upgrade to Tahoe myself …

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Hmm, upgraded to macOS 26.1, and it might just be that first builds just take an extremely long time, like 114557ms for 27 pages and 52 files in a directory that’s only 7.5mb.

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That sounds really odd … OK, I’ll bite the bullet and upgrade my MacBook. To 26.1 … This I will probably regret.

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OK, second thought, I’m doing using my MacBook Mini M1 as a guinea pig …

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OK, I can reproduce this, see MacOS Tahoe is very slow for hugo installed via brew · Issue #14127 · gohugoio/hugo · GitHub

I need to dig more into this, but follow the issue above for progress.

A workaround is to build from source: GitHub - gohugoio/hugo: The world’s fastest framework for building websites.

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I was just about to upgrade! I guess I’ll hold off for a bit longer. Not an issue I expected to even see in the wild.

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FWIW, I haven’t noticed any slowdown/issues after the upgrade
(hugo v0.148.2+extended+withdeploy darwin/arm64 BuildDate=2025-07-27T12:43:24Z VendorInfo=brew)

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That’s odd …Maybe I need to do some more checking of my Brew setup before I conclude, but I definitively got the wrong binary when running brew install hugo on my Tahoe upgraded MacMini M1.

@willduncanphoto I’m waiting til 26.2 before I upgrade my workhorse MacBook.

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Maybe that’s the difference: I didn’t run a brew update after the tahoe upgrade, so I’m still running the old binary.

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This fixed it for me: MacOS Tahoe is very slow for hugo installed via brew · Issue #14127 · gohugoio/hugo · GitHub

(note that there may be less drastic ways to fix this, but starting fresh is often a good thing)