Editing your config

Your Hugo config is the file most likely to break a site, and the one you edit least often – so you never quite remember what the keys are called. HugoKit gives it a form, a raw editor, and one rule: nothing is written to disk until you’ve seen the diff.

Two tabs, one file

The Config page opens your site’s config file – TOML, YAML or JSON; the format is detected from the file, not assumed.

• Structured – a form, grouped into sections: Basics, Build, Author, Params, Markup, Taxonomies, Main Menu and Additional Fields. A pinned chip bar across the top jumps to a section.
• Raw – the file as text, for anything the form doesn’t cover.

The two tabs are the same document. Switch between them and your edits follow – type a key in Raw, and it turns up in the form; change a field in the form, and it’s in the raw text.

Additional Fields is where the keys HugoKit has no field for end up. They aren’t hidden, and they aren’t dropped on save.

Nothing is written until you approve it

Edit anything and an amber Edited badge appears next to the title. That’s the only thing that has happened so far – the file on disk is untouched.

Save doesn’t save. It builds the new file contents and shows you a diff: every changed key, old value against new. Approve it, and then it’s written. Revert throws the edits away and reloads the file as it is on disk.

That means a mistyped key costs you a glance, not a broken build.

And even an approved save has a way back: HugoKit snapshots the config as it was before writing, so the change can be undone from the site’s Snapshots sheet. More on that in Snapshots and undo.

When Hugo disagrees

If a build fails with a config error, the error is surfaced on the Config page rather than left in the log – so the message and the field it’s complaining about are on the same screen.

What HugoKit doesn’t do

It doesn’t reformat your file. Keys you never touched keep their place, their spelling and their comments – the diff only ever contains what you changed.