Did you know that when you create a new post in Hugo that you can set the default front matter set for you?

I didn’t know either until after I had done over 50 posts where I created all of my posts files and front matter by hand. Whereas I could have had Hugo create the files for me and set default front matter that I wanted.

In this post, we will look at how you can also set your default front matter for your post.

My Default Front Matter

For my post, my default front matter is:

---
categories: [""]
date: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02" .Date }}T13:00:00Z
draft: true
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
url: ''
---

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Create Default Front Matter

To create our default front matter we need to create an archetypes file for your posts section.

Archetypes files are content templates that contain preconfigured front matter.

  1. Create the directory layouts\archetypes

  2. Create the file layouts\archetypes\posts.md

  3. In your posts.md file, here is my front matter

    ---
categories: [""]
date: {{ dateFormat "2006-01-02" .Date }}T13:00:00Z
draft: true
title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
url: ''
---

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Create New Post

Now that you have your posts archetype template created, the last thing to do is create a new post which you can do by running:

hugo new posts/my-post.md

Your my-post.md file will look like that following with the date updated for the day you created the file.

---
categories: [""]
date: 2022-03-09T13:00:00Z
draft: true
title: "My Post"
url: ''
---

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