PostProcess

Marking a resource with resources.PostProcess delays any transformations to after the build, typically because one or more of the steps in the transformation chain depends on the result of the build (e.g. files in public).

A prime use case for this is CSS purging with PostCSS.

There are currently two limitations to this:

1. This only works in *.html templates (i.e. templates that produces HTML files).

2. You cannot manipulate the values returned from the resource’s methods. E.g. the upper in this example will not work as expected:

   {{ $css := resources.Get "css/main.css" }}
   {{ $css = $css | resources.PostCSS | minify | fingerprint | resources.PostProcess }}
   {{ $css.RelPermalink | upper }}
   

CSS purging with PostCSS

The below configuration will write a hugo_stats.json file to the project root as part of the build. If you’re only using this for the production build, you should consider placing it below config/production.

build:
  writeStats: true

[build]
  writeStats = true

{
   "build": {
      "writeStats": true
   }
}

postcss.config.js

const purgecss = require('@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss')({
    content: [ './hugo_stats.json' ],
    defaultExtractor: (content) => {
        let els = JSON.parse(content).htmlElements;
        return els.tags.concat(els.classes, els.ids);
    }
});

module.exports = {
     plugins: [
         ...(process.env.HUGO_ENVIRONMENT === 'production' ? [ purgecss ] : [])
     ]
 };

Note that in the example above, the “CSS purge step” will only be applied to the production build. This means that you need to do something like this in your head template to build and include your CSS:

{{ $css := resources.Get "css/main.css" }}
{{ $css = $css | resources.PostCSS }}
{{ if hugo.IsProduction }}
{{ $css = $css | minify | fingerprint | resources.PostProcess }}
{{ end }}
<link href="{{ $css.RelPermalink }}" rel="stylesheet" />