Content Formats

Both HTML and Markdown are supported content formats.

You can put any file type into your /content directories, but Hugo uses the markup front matter value if set or the file extension (see Markup identifiers in the table below) to determine if the markup needs to be processed, e.g.:.

Markdown converted to HTML
Shortcodes processed
Layout applied


          .               .                .               .--- 1          .-- 1     / 1
         / \              |                |           .---+            .-+         +
        /   \         .---+---.         .--+--.        |   '--- 2      |   '-- 2   / \ 2
       +     +        |       |        |       |    ---+            ---+          +
      / \   / \     .-+-.   .-+-.     .+.     .+.      |   .--- 3      |   .-- 3   \ / 3
     /   \ /   \    |   |   |   |    |   |   |   |     '---+            '-+         +
     1   7 3   4    1   2   3   4    1   2   3   4         '--- 4          '-- 4     \ 4

List of content formats

The current list of content formats in Hugo:

Name	Markup identifiers	Comment
Goldmark	md, markdown, goldmark	Note that you can set the default handler of `md` and `markdown` to something else, see Configure Markup . New in v0.60.0
Blackfriday	blackfriday	Blackfriday will eventually be deprecated.
MMark	mmark	Mmark is deprecated and will be removed in a future release.
Emacs Org-Mode	org	See go-org .
AsciiDoc	asciidocext, adoc, ad	Needs Asciidoctor installed.
RST	rst	Needs RST installed.
Pandoc	pandoc, pdc	Needs Pandoc installed.
HTML	html, htm	To be treated as a content file, with layout, shortcodes etc., it must have front matter. If not, it will be copied as-is.

The markup identifier is fetched from either the markup variable in front matter or from the file extension. For markup-related configuration, see Configure Markup .

External Helpers

Some of the formats in the table above need external helpers installed on your PC. For example, for AsciiDoc files, Hugo will try to call the asciidoctor command. This means that you will have to install the associated tool on your machine to be able to use these formats.

Hugo passes reasonable default arguments to these external helpers by default:

asciidoctor: --no-header-footer -
rst2html: --leave-comments --initial-header-level=2
pandoc: --mathjax

External Helper AsciiDoc

AsciiDoc implementation EOLs in Jan 2020 and is no longer supported. AsciiDoc development is being continued under Asciidoctor . The format AsciiDoc remains of course. Please continue with the implementation Asciidoctor.

External Helper Asciidoctor

The Asciidoctor community offers a wide set of tools for the AsciiDoc format that can be installed additionally to Hugo. See the Asciidoctor docs for installation instructions . Make sure that also all optional extensions like asciidoctor-diagram or asciidoctor-html5s are installed if required.

Some Asciidoctor parameters can be customized in Hugo:

Parameter	Comment
backend	Don’t change this unless you know what you are doing.
doctype	Currently, the only document type supported in Hugo is `article`.
extensions	Possible extensions are `asciidoctor-html5s`, `asciidoctor-bibtex`, `asciidoctor-diagram`, `asciidoctor-interdoc-reftext`, `asciidoctor-katex`, `asciidoctor-latex`, `asciidoctor-mathematical`, `asciidoctor-question`, `asciidoctor-rouge`.
attributes	Variables to be referenced in your AsciiDoc file. This is a list of variable name/value maps. See Asciidoctor’s attributes .
noHeaderOrFooter	Output an embeddable document, which excludes the header, the footer, and everything outside the body of the document. Don’t change this unless you know what you are doing.
safeMode	Safe mode level `unsafe`, `safe`, `server` or `secure`. Don’t change this unless you know what you are doing.
sectionNumbers	Auto-number section titles.
verbose	Verbosely print processing information and configuration file checks to stderr.
trace	Include backtrace information on errors.
failureLevel	The minimum logging level that triggers a non-zero exit code (failure).

Hugo provides additional settings that don’t map directly to Asciidoctor’s CLI options:

workingFolderCurrent: Sets the working directory to be the same as that of the AsciiDoc file being processed, so that include will work with relative paths. This setting uses the asciidoctor cli parameter --base-dir and attribute outdir=. For rendering diagrams with asciidoctor-diagram , workingFolderCurrent must be set to true.
preserveTOC: By default, Hugo removes the table of contents generated by Asciidoctor and provides it through the built-in variable .TableOfContents to enable further customization and better integration with the various Hugo themes. This option can be set to true to preserve Asciidoctor’s TOC in the generated page.

Below are all the AsciiDoc related settings in Hugo with their default values:

markup:
  asciidocExt:
    attributes: {}
    backend: html5
    extensions: []
    failureLevel: fatal
    noHeaderOrFooter: true
    preserveTOC: false
    safeMode: unsafe
    sectionNumbers: false
    trace: false
    verbose: false
    workingFolderCurrent: false

[markup]
  [markup.asciidocExt]
    backend = 'html5'
    extensions = []
    failureLevel = 'fatal'
    noHeaderOrFooter = true
    preserveTOC = false
    safeMode = 'unsafe'
    sectionNumbers = false
    trace = false
    verbose = false
    workingFolderCurrent = false
    [markup.asciidocExt.attributes]

{
   "markup": {
      "asciidocExt": {
         "attributes": {},
         "backend": "html5",
         "extensions": [],
         "failureLevel": "fatal",
         "noHeaderOrFooter": true,
         "preserveTOC": false,
         "safeMode": "unsafe",
         "sectionNumbers": false,
         "trace": false,
         "verbose": false,
         "workingFolderCurrent": false
      }
   }
}

Example of how to set extensions and attributes:


[markup.asciidocExt]
extensions = ["asciidoctor-html5s", "asciidoctor-diagram"]
workingFolderCurrent = true
[markup.asciidocExt.attributes]
my-base-url = "https://example.com/"
my-attribute-name = "my value"

In a complex Asciidoctor environment it is sometimes helpful to debug the exact call to your external helper with all parameters. Run Hugo with -v. You will get an output like


INFO 2019/12/22 09:08:48 Rendering book-as-pdf.adoc with C:\Ruby26-x64\bin\asciidoctor.bat using asciidoc args [--no-header-footer -r asciidoctor-html5s -b html5s -r asciidoctor-diagram --base-dir D:\prototypes\hugo_asciidoc_ddd\docs -a outdir=D:\prototypes\hugo_asciidoc_ddd\build -] ...

Learn Markdown

Markdown syntax is simple enough to learn in a single sitting. The following are excellent resources to get you up and running: