Using Hugo Theme Modules With Netlify

This blog runs on hugo so I try to make use of hugo features. According to the hugo website modules are now recommended to insert content into a hugo site a simple and useful example being a theme.

Since I use my personal fork of the minimal theme I decided to try this out. It’s quite easy to do.

The main steps are:

• install Go
• run hugo mod init <module name> in the top directory. I just used myblog as name which worked. This creates a go.mod file.
• change the config.toml entry for the theme to simply point to the repo. In my case the entry is theme = github.com/Bassmann/minimal. The hugo documentation recommends to also add this as a module but it seems to work also without it.

Local testing worked fine which creates also a go.sumfile. So I happily commited and pushed the content and the new files. Unfortunately the deployment at Netlify failed and I got confused.

The solution however is simple enough: Netlify needs to be told to install go as part of the build. This is turn only requires to add an environment variable called GO_VERSION with the value of the go version you want to use. In my case it’s 1.15.7. With this change everything works as intended.