Quick start

Create a small site with a home page and a blog post, preview it with the development server, and build it for publishing.

This guide takes about ten minutes. You need the fugo binary on your PATH; see Installation if you do not have it yet.

fugo version

Create the project#

A fugo project is a directory with a configuration file, content and templates:

mkdir -p my-site/content/posts my-site/layouts
cd my-site

Create the configuration file config.toml:

baseURL = "https://example.org/"
title = "My site"
languageCode = "en-us"

baseURL: https://example.org/
languageCode: en-us
title: My site

{
   "baseURL": "https://example.org/",
   "languageCode": "en-us",
   "title": "My site"
}

Add content#

Content is Markdown with front matter. The home page’s content is content/_index.md:

---
title: Home
---
Welcome to my site.

A blog post is a page of the posts section, content/posts/hello.md:

---
title: Hello, fugo
date: 2026-10-02
---
This is my **first** post.

Add templates#

fugo does not ship a theme: a site brings its layouts, or a theme that has them. Templates are Tera files, named after what they render. Start with a base template that every page extends, layouts/baseof.html:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="{{ site.language_code or "en" }}">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>{% block title %}{{ page.title }} | {{ site.title }}{% endblock title %}</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <header><a href="{{ site.home.rel_permalink }}">{{ site.title }}</a></header>
    <main>{% block main %}{% endblock main %}</main>
  </body>
</html>

The home page lists the posts, layouts/home.html:

{% extends "baseof.html" %}
{% block title %}{{ site.title }}{% endblock title %}
{% block main %}
  {{ page.content }}
  <h2>Posts</h2>
  <ul>
    {% for p in site.regular_pages %}
      <li>
        <a href="{{ p.rel_permalink }}">{{ p.title }}</a>
        <time>{{ p.date | date(format="%B %-d, %Y") }}</time>
      </li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% endblock main %}

A post uses layouts/single.html:

{% extends "baseof.html" %}
{% block main %}
  <article>
    <h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
    {{ page.content }}
  </article>
{% endblock main %}

And a section such as /posts/ uses layouts/list.html:

{% extends "baseof.html" %}
{% block main %}
  <h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
  <ul>
    {% for p in page.pages %}
      <li><a href="{{ p.rel_permalink }}">{{ p.title }}</a></li>
    {% endfor %}
  </ul>
{% endblock main %}

Check the templates before you build. fugo templates check reports syntax errors, unknown functions and missing templates with their positions:

fugo templates check

Preview with the server#

fugo server

Open http://localhost:1313/. The server builds the site into memory, watches the project, and reloads the browser when you save a file. Edit content/posts/hello.md and watch the page change. Press Ctrl+C to stop it.

Drafts and pages dated in the future are left out unless you ask for them: fugo server -D -F.

Build for publishing#

fugo

fugo without a command builds the site into public/, the directory you upload to your host. Add --minify to minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript. See Host and deploy for publishing to GitHub Pages and other hosts.

Next steps#

• Learn the directory structure of a project.
• Organize content with sections and page bundles.
• Learn Tera templates and the template lookup order.
• Look up any function in the reference.