Create a new site: start with a prepopulated site

Create a new Hugo site by using a clone of the Docsy example site as your starting point.

3 minute read

The simplest way to create a new Docsy site is to use the source of the Docsy example site as starting point. This approach gives you a skeleton structure for your site, with top-level and documentation sections and templates that you can modify as necessary. The example site automatically pulls in the Docsy theme as a Hugo Module, so it’s easy to keep up to date.

If you prefer to create a site from scratch, follow the instructions in Start a site from scratch.

TL;DR: Setup for the impatient expert

At your Unix shell or Windows command line, run the following command:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.0 https://github.com/google/docsy-example.git my-new-site
cd  my-new-site
hugo server

You now can preview your new site in your browser at http://localhost:1313.

Detailed Setup instructions

Clone the Docsy example site

The Example Site gives you a good starting point for building your docs site and is pre-configured to automatically pull in the Docsy theme as a Hugo Module. There are two different routes to get a local clone of the example site:

If you want to create a local copy only, choose option 1.
If you have a GitHub account and want to create a GitHub repo for your site go for option 2.

Option 1: Using the command line (local copy only)

If you want to use a remote repository other than GitHub (such as GitLab, BitBucket, AWS CodeCommit, Gitea) or if you don’t want a remote repo at all, simply make a local working copy of the example site directly using git clone. As last parameter, give your chosen local repo name (here: my-new-site):

git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.0 https://github.com/google/docsy-example.git my-new-site

Option 2: Using the GitHub UI (local copy + associated GitHub repo)

As the Docsy example site repo is a template repository, creating your own remote GitHub clone of this Docsy example site repo is quite easy:

Go to the repo of the Docsy example site.
Use the dropdown for switching branches/tags to change to the latest released tag v0.0.
Click the button Use this template and select the option Create a new repository from the dropdown.
Chose a name for your new repository (e.g. my-new-site) and type it in the Repository name field. You can also add an optional Description.
Click Create repository from template to create your new repository. Congratulations, you just created your remote Github clone which now serves as starting point for your own site!
Make a local copy of your newly created GitHub repository by using git clone, giving your repo’s web URL as last parameter.
```
git clone https://github.com/me-at-github/my-new-site.git
```

Note

Depending on your environment you may need to tweak the module top level settings inside your hugo.toml slightly, for example by adding a proxy to use when downloading remote modules. You can find details of what these configuration settings do in the Hugo modules documentation.

Now you can make local edits and test your copied site locally with Hugo.

Preview your site

To build and preview your site locally, switch to the root of your cloned project and use hugo’s server command:

cd my-new-site
hugo server

Preview your site in your browser at: http://localhost:1313. Thanks to Hugo’s live preview, you can immediately see the effect of changes that you are making to the source files of your local repo. Use Ctrl + c to stop the Hugo server whenever you like. See the known issues on MacOS.