Introduction is a minimalist, highly-versatile theme for Hugo. It can be configured as a single page, or as a full-featured site with multiple sections. It is multilingual, responsive, and includes a light and dark theme.
New to the Hugo static site generator? Learn the fundamentals here.
Features:
- Multilingual - supports side-by-side content in different language versions
- Custom index page sections from Markdown files
- Projects and Blog sections
- Page load fade-in CSS effect and smooth scrolling to anchor links
- Straightforward customization via
config.toml - Styled Markdown throughout, including post titles
- Syntax highlighting
Developer-friendly:
- Sass files included with instant compiling to CSS thanks to Hugo Pipes and PostCSS
- Thoughtful use of Sass variables makes creating new colour schemes easy
Requires Hugo extended 0.163.0 or later. See the Hugo installation instructions. The minimum supported version and the latest release are tested in CI.
Production builds also require Node.js 22.12 or later and the theme's local PostCSS dependencies. From the theme directory, install the locked versions:
npm ci --ignore-scriptsWhen using the theme inside another Hugo site, put the theme's local tools on your path before building. From your site's root:
PATH="$PWD/themes/introduction/node_modules/.bin:$PATH" hugohugo server previews compile Sass without PostCSS. Production builds use PostCSS to add browser prefixes; no global npm packages are required.
Run from the root of your Hugo site:
git clone https://github.com/victoriadrake/hugo-theme-introduction.git themes/introductionAlternatively, you can include this repository as a git submodule. This makes it easier to update this theme if you have your Hugo site in git as well:
git submodule add https://github.com/victoriadrake/hugo-theme-introduction.git themes/introductionIntroduction ships with a fully configured example site. From the theme directory:
npm run devThen visit http://localhost:1313/ in your browser to view the example site.
To build the example site, run npm run build. Output goes to docs/. Override the example URL with HUGO_BASEURL=https://example.org/ npm run build when needed.
Run npm test for the build regressions (Python 3.9+ and Google Chrome required) and npm run check:html after building to check internal links and assets, including accidental example.com URLs. The tests use temporary copies and leave local content and generated resources untouched.
This modernization keeps the existing content and configuration model. Navigation and project dialogs use native JavaScript; the existing Owl Carousel still uses bundled jQuery.
The live demo automatically builds and publishes successful pushes to master. netlify.toml controls the build: it runs npm run build && npm run check:html from the repository root and publishes docs/.
The demo pins Hugo 0.165.0 and Node.js 24. This is separate from the theme's minimum supported Hugo version, 0.163.0. New Hugo releases are tested by CI, but the demo's pin must be updated explicitly. Settings in netlify.toml take precedence over matching settings in the Netlify dashboard.
After deploying, verify the Hugo version in the production build log and check that images load from the demo domain. A failed build leaves the previous successful deployment live.
The following explains how to add content to your Hugo site. You can find sample content in the exampleSite/ folder.
Create index.md:
hugo new home/index.mdThe title frontmatter will be the first large heading.
The content of index.md will be shown as a subtitle line.
You might want to set headless to true in the frontmatter. See headless bundles for more information.
Content for the home page lives under content/home/. You may add as many files as you want to in markdown format.
Each markdown file will show as a section on the home page and can be ordered by the weight value in the file's frontmatter. You can set image to show an image on the left side of the section. The image file must be in the content/home/ folder.
You may add a contact section by creating
contact.md:
hugo new home/contact.mdThis will always be shown as the last section on the home page.
Introduction provides an easy way to showcase your projects. Each project can even have its own gallery, shown as an image carousel.
Start by creating an index file for the projects section:
hugo new projects/_index.mdAdd a title and some optional content to the file.
Add an optional weight for ordering projects section.
To create a project, run:
hugo new projects/YourProjectName/index.mdThe frontmatter of your new file contains some comments to help your configure your project.
You can set external_link to make the project link to another website.
Add images to your project by placing image files in the YourProjectName/ folder. If you add more then one photo, they will display as a carousel gallery. Images will be ordered by filename. The first image will be shown as the project preview image. You can change the order of your images by adding a weight to that resource's parameters:
resources:
- src: NameOfYourImage.jpg
params:
weight: -100
project_timeframe: "June-December"You can add a project_timeframe parameter to the frontmatter of your project to optionally display an arbitrary string on the homepage and modal.
Create an index file for the blog:
hugo new blog/_index.mdAdd an optional weight for ordering blog section on your homepage
Create a new blog post with:
hugo new blog/YourEntryTitle.mdPosts will also display in the Blog section of the home page.
From exampleSite/, copy config.toml to the root folder of your Hugo site and change the fields as you like. Helpful comments are provided.
Introduction currently ships with support for many languages. Contributions for other language translations are welcome.
To create a new language translation, add the .toml file to the i18n/ folder. See the existing files for the necessary fields.
See the hugo documentation for more details.
Introduction contains a default menu. If you want to override this, you can do so by defining a menu.main in config.toml.
Optionally, you can disable this menu by setting showMenu to false in your config.toml.
Introduction can optionally show your current local time in your contact section. This uses vanilla JS and variables you provide. You can set this up by copying the settings in the exampleSite config.toml for localTime, timeZone, and timeFormat.
You can easily use Plausible.io for analytics by setting plausible = true in your config.toml. Plausible offers a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. You'll need your own Plausible account - see plausible.io for more.
For Google Analytics 4, set the measurement ID in your configuration:
[services.googleAnalytics]
id = "G-MEASUREMENT_ID"The theme loads Google's gtag.js when this ID is present.
Set disqusshortname in config.toml to activate Hugo's internal Disqus template.
You can add custom CSS files by placing them under assets/ and adding the paths to the files to the customCSS list in config.toml.
You can add custom JavaScript files by placing them under assets/ and adding the paths to the files to the customJS list in config.toml.
If you have a question or get stuck, please open an issue for help and to help those who come after you. The more information you can provide, the better!
Contributions for new translations, fixes, and features are welcome.
This theme would not be nearly as awesome without its amazing community of open source contributors. Thank you so much! ❤
Copyright (C) 2017-2026 Victoria Drake
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.