This tutorial will show you how to create a simple theme in Hugo. I assume that you are familiar with HTML, the bash command line, and that you are comfortable using Markdown to format content. I’ll explain how Hugo uses templates and how you can organize your templates to create a theme. I won’t cover using CSS to style your theme.

Hugo uses the excellent go html/template library for its template engine. It is an extremely lightweight engine that provides a very small amount of logic. In our experience that it is just the right amount of logic to be able to create a good static website. If you have used other template systems from different languages or frameworks you will find a lot of similarities in go templates.