How to Create a Gitignore File for a Hugo Site

Creating a useful gitignore file means you understand the hugo directory structure.

At the very least, a .gitignore file for a Hugo site should contain these lines:

/public/
/resources/
.hugo_build.lock

When you create a hugo site, it will create the following file structure in your project:

example/
├── archetypes/
│   └── default.md
├── assets/
├── content/
├── data/
├── layouts/
├── public/
├── static/
├── themes/
└── config.toml

Getting to know why Hugo creates these files and folders will help you understand which files or folders to add to your .gitignore file. In other words, the files you want to tell git not to track.

The Reasons We Can Ignore Certain Files in Our Project #

The public Folder #

The public folder is generated at build time. If you wanted to go live, you could simply run the hugo command. Hugo would do things like convert all your markdown pages to html pages and place them in your public folder.

So, you don’t need to back up the public folder, you need to back up the files used to create it.

The resources Folder #

The resources folder is not created by default. You can still create a site with Hugo without a resources folder.

The Hugo documentation states that the resources folder is primarily used to cache files to speed things up at build time. And, stores Sass files to avoid a preprocessor being installed. Basically, the folder can be ignored.

The .hugo_build.lock File #

The .hugo_build.lock file is an empty and temporarily created by your system. I opened my .hugo_build.lock file in a text editor, and it was in fact empty.

It’s use is to let other applications know that a resource is being used, should not be accessed. So, this file can also be ignored.

Conclusion #

Github repositories can get bloated unnecessarily. Understanding, what files are and what they do is a worthwhile investment of your time. A big reason we use Hugo is for speed. Why slow things down with unnecessary files.