Frontmatter is configruation section at the beginning of markdown files, it uses two --- wrap (different data uses different symbol wrap, YAML is recommended) to define posts’ basic information, or cover some parameters in hugo.yaml. Every archetypes has common and unique frontmatters.
If you don’t know what is archetypes, see Archetypes.
Default Archetypes
Default archetypes is used to generate posts and other content for which no content template is defined.
Basic
1---
2# required
3title: "Post Title"
4date: 2025-06-13
5# Optinal
6description: "Post description"
7draft: false
8categories: ["categories 1", "categories 2"]
9tags: ["tags 1", "tags 2"]
10slug: "custom-url"
11cover: ""
12---If you don’t matter SEO, you can use the theme archetypes to auto generate slug, it generates a random 7-digit string.
1slug: { { substr .File.UniqueID 0 7 } }Note
See Hugo Documentation for more frontmatter.
Other frontmatter
Default(Posts) archetypes also support other frontmatters, these configurations involve some features of the theme, usually configured in hugo.yaml, but you can also modify the overrides in the frontmatter.
1# math formula
2katex:
3 enabled: true
4 delimiters:
5 - left: $$
6 right: $$
7 display: true
8 - left: $
9 right: $
10 display: false
11
12# charts
13mermaid:
14 enabled: true
15
16# related posts
17showRelated: true
18
19# posts license
20post:
21 license:
22 show: true
23 author: "Hugo Narrow"
24 name: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0"
25 description: "This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please attribute the source, use non-commercially, and maintain the same license."
26 url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"
27 displayName: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0"Projects Archetype
The projects archetype is used to generate project files. The basic frontmatter parameter are the same as the default archetype. There are also unique frontmatter. The following are the unique parameters of the projects archetype:
1cover: ""
2featured: false
3url: "www.example.com"
4status: "completed" # Options: completed, in_progress, planning