Data Templates

Hugo supports loading data from YAML, JSON, XML, and TOML files located in the data directory in the root of your Hugo project.

The Data Folder

The data folder is where you can store additional data for Hugo to use when generating your site. Data files aren’t used to generate standalone pages; rather, they’re meant to be supplemental to content files. This feature can extend the content in case your front matter fields grow out of control. Or perhaps you want to show a larger dataset in a template (see example below). In both cases, it’s a good idea to outsource the data in their own files.

These files must be YAML, JSON, XML, or TOML files (using the .yml, .yaml, .json, .xml, or .toml extension). The data will be accessible as a map in the .Site.Data variable.

If you wish to access the data using the .Site.Data.filename notation, the filename must begin with an underscore or a Unicode letter, followed by zero or more underscores, Unicode letters, or Unicode digits. eg:

• 123.json - Invalid
• x123.json - Valid
• _123.json - Valid

If you wish to access the data using the index function, the filename is irrelevant. For example:

Data Files in Themes

Data Files can also be used in Hugo themes but note that theme data files are merged with the project directory taking precedence (i.e., given two files with the same name and relative path, the data in the file in the root project data directory will override the data from the file in the themes/<THEME>/data directory for keys that are duplicated).

Therefore, theme authors should take care to not include data files that could be easily overwritten by a user who decides to customize a theme. For theme-specific data items that shouldn’t be overridden, it can be wise to prefix the folder structure with a namespace; e.g. mytheme/data/<THEME>/somekey/.... To check if any such duplicate exists, run hugo with the -v flag.

The keys in the map created with data templates from data files will be a dot-chained set of path, filename, and key in file (if applicable).

This is best explained with an example:

Example: Jaco Pastorius’ Solo Discography

Jaco Pastorius was a great bass player, but his solo discography is short enough to use as an example. John Patitucci is another bass giant.

The example below is a bit contrived, but it illustrates the flexibility of data Files. This example uses TOML as its file format with the two following data files:

• data/jazz/bass/jacopastorius.toml
• data/jazz/bass/johnpatitucci.toml

jacopastorius.toml contains the content below. johnpatitucci.toml contains a similar list:

discography:
- 1974 - Modern American Music … Period! The Criteria Sessions
- 1974 - Jaco
- 1976 - Jaco Pastorius
- 1981 - Word of Mouth
- 1981 - The Birthday Concert (released in 1995)
- 1982 - Twins I & II (released in 1999)
- 1983 - Invitation
- 1986 - Broadway Blues (released in 1998)
- 1986 - Honestly Solo Live (released in 1990)
- 1986 - Live In Italy (released in 1991)
- 1986 - Heavy'n Jazz (released in 1992)
- 1991 - Live In New York City, Volumes 1-7.
- 1999 - Rare Collection (compilation)
- '2003 - Punk Jazz: The Jaco Pastorius Anthology (compilation)'
- 2007 - The Essential Jaco Pastorius (compilation)

discography = ['1974 - Modern American Music … Period! The Criteria Sessions', '1974 - Jaco', '1976 - Jaco Pastorius', '1981 - Word of Mouth', '1981 - The Birthday Concert (released in 1995)', '1982 - Twins I & II (released in 1999)', '1983 - Invitation', '1986 - Broadway Blues (released in 1998)', '1986 - Honestly Solo Live (released in 1990)', '1986 - Live In Italy (released in 1991)', "1986 - Heavy'n Jazz (released in 1992)", '1991 - Live In New York City, Volumes 1-7.', '1999 - Rare Collection (compilation)', '2003 - Punk Jazz: The Jaco Pastorius Anthology (compilation)', '2007 - The Essential Jaco Pastorius (compilation)']

{
   "discography": [
      "1974 - Modern American Music … Period! The Criteria Sessions",
      "1974 - Jaco",
      "1976 - Jaco Pastorius",
      "1981 - Word of Mouth",
      "1981 - The Birthday Concert (released in 1995)",
      "1982 - Twins I \u0026 II (released in 1999)",
      "1983 - Invitation",
      "1986 - Broadway Blues (released in 1998)",
      "1986 - Honestly Solo Live (released in 1990)",
      "1986 - Live In Italy (released in 1991)",
      "1986 - Heavy'n Jazz (released in 1992)",
      "1991 - Live In New York City, Volumes 1-7.",
      "1999 - Rare Collection (compilation)",
      "2003 - Punk Jazz: The Jaco Pastorius Anthology (compilation)",
      "2007 - The Essential Jaco Pastorius (compilation)"
   ]
}

The list of bass players can be accessed via .Site.Data.jazz.bass, a single bass player by adding the filename without the suffix, e.g. .Site.Data.jazz.bass.jacopastorius.

You can now render the list of recordings for all the bass players in a template:

{{ range $.Site.Data.jazz.bass }}
   {{ partial "artist.html" . }}
{{ end }}

And then in the partials/artist.html:

<ul>
{{ range .discography }}
  <li>{{ . }}</li>
{{ end }}
</ul>

Discover a new favorite bass player? Just add another .toml file in the same directory.

Example: Accessing Named Values in a Data File

Assume you have the following data structure in your User0123.[yml|toml|xml|json] data file located directly in data/:

Achievements:
- Can create a Key, Value list from Data File
- Learns Hugo
- Reads documentation
Name: User0123
Short Description: He is a **jolly good** fellow.

Achievements = ['Can create a Key, Value list from Data File', 'Learns Hugo', 'Reads documentation']
Name = 'User0123'
'Short Description' = 'He is a **jolly good** fellow.'

{
   "Achievements": [
      "Can create a Key, Value list from Data File",
      "Learns Hugo",
      "Reads documentation"
   ],
   "Name": "User0123",
   "Short Description": "He is a **jolly good** fellow."
}

You can use the following code to render the Short Description in your layout:

<div>Short Description of {{.Site.Data.User0123.Name}}: <p>{{ index .Site.Data.User0123 "Short Description" | markdownify }}</p></div>

Note the use of the markdownify template function. This will send the description through the Markdown rendering engine.

Get Remote Data

Use getJSON or getCSV to get remote data:

{{ $dataJ := getJSON "url" }}
{{ $dataC := getCSV "separator" "url" }}

If you use a prefix or postfix for the URL, the functions accept variadic arguments:

{{ $dataJ := getJSON "url prefix" "arg1" "arg2" "arg n" }}
{{ $dataC := getCSV  "separator" "url prefix" "arg1" "arg2" "arg n" }}

The separator for getCSV must be put in the first position and can only be one character long.

All passed arguments will be joined to the final URL:

{{ $urlPre := "https://api.github.com" }}
{{ $gistJ := getJSON $urlPre "/users/GITHUB_USERNAME/gists" }}

This will resolve internally to the following:

{{ $gistJ := getJSON "https://api.github.com/users/GITHUB_USERNAME/gists" }}

Add HTTP headers

Both getJSON and getCSV takes an optional map as the last argument, e.g.:

{{ $data := getJSON "https://example.org/api" (dict "Authorization" "Bearer abcd")  }}

If you need multiple values for the same header key, use a slice:

{{ $data := getJSON "https://example.org/api" (dict "X-List" (slice "a" "b" "c"))  }}

Example for CSV files

For getCSV, the one-character-long separator must be placed in the first position followed by the URL. The following is an example of creating an HTML table in a partial template from a published CSV:

  <table>
    <thead>
      <tr>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Position</th>
      <th>Salary</th>
      </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
    {{ $url := "https://example.com/finance/employee-salaries.csv" }}
    {{ $sep := "," }}
    {{ range $i, $r := getCSV $sep $url }}
      <tr>
        <td>{{ index $r 0 }}</td>
        <td>{{ index $r 1 }}</td>
        <td>{{ index $r 2 }}</td>
      </tr>
    {{ end }}
    </tbody>
  </table>

The expression {{index $r number}} must be used to output the nth-column from the current row.

Cache URLs

Each downloaded URL will be cached in the default folder $TMPDIR/hugo_cache/. The variable $TMPDIR will be resolved to your system-dependent temporary directory.

With the command-line flag --cacheDir, you can specify any folder on your system as a caching directory.

You can also set cacheDir in the main configuration file.

If you don’t like caching at all, you can fully disable caching with the command-line flag --ignoreCache.

Authentication When Using REST URLs

Currently, you can only use those authentication methods that can be put into an URL. OAuth and other authentication methods are not implemented.

Load Local files

To load local files with getJSON and getCSV, the source files must reside within Hugo’s working directory. The file extension does not matter, but the content does.

It applies the same output logic as above in Get Remote Data.

LiveReload with Data Files

There is no chance to trigger a LiveReload when the content of a URL changes. However, when a local file changes (i.e., data/* and themes/<THEME>/data/*), a LiveReload will be triggered. Symlinks are not supported. Note too that because downloading of data takes a while, Hugo stops processing your Markdown files until the data download has completed.

Examples of Data-driven Content

• Photo gallery JSON powered: https://github.com/pcdummy/hugo-lightslider-example
• GitHub Starred Repositories in a post using data-driven content in a custom short code.

Specs for Data Formats

• TOML Spec
• YAML Spec
• JSON Spec
• CSV Spec
• XML Spec