Skip to main content

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/gurusabarish/hugo-profile/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Hugo Profile includes client-side full-text search powered by a JSON index generated at build time. No external search service or API key is required — the search index is built by Hugo and queried entirely in the browser using search.js.

​
How It Works

When Hugo builds your site, it generates an index.json file at the site root by iterating over all regular content pages. The search.js script fetches this file on demand and filters results by matching the user’s query against each page’s title, description, and content fields. Results appear as a dropdown overlay anchored below the search input in the navbar. The search is debounced with a 300 ms delay so the index is only queried after the user pauses typing, keeping performance smooth even on larger sites.

​
Enabling and Disabling Search

Search is enabled by default. To disable it, set params.navbar.disableSearch to true in your hugo.yaml: 
params:
  navbar:
    disableSearch: false   # Set to true to remove the search box entirely
The search input is visible in the navbar on desktop viewports. On mobile, a second search input is shown inside the collapsed navbar menu.

​
Customizing the Placeholder Text

Override the default "Search..." placeholder with params.navbar.searchPlaceholder. If this param is not set, the theme falls back to the i18n string search_placeholder: 
params:
  navbar:
    searchPlaceholder: "Search posts..."

​
Required Output Configuration

For search to work, Hugo must generate the JSON index at build time. Ensure your hugo.yaml includes "JSON" in the outputs.home list: 
outputs:
  home:
    - "HTML"
    - "RSS"
    - "JSON"
  page:
    - "HTML"
    - "RSS"
If "JSON" is missing from outputs.home, Hugo will not generate index.json and the search feature will fail silently — the search box will appear but return no results.

​
Search Index Format

The index.json template (layouts/_default/index.json) iterates over all pages recursively and serializes each one as a JSON object. The raw template that produces this output is: 
{{- $.Scratch.Add "index" slice -}}
{{- range .RegularPagesRecursive -}}
    {{- $.Scratch.Add "index" (dict "title" .Title "description" .Params.description
        "content" .Content "image" .Params.image "permalink" .Permalink) -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- $.Scratch.Get "index" | jsonify -}}
Each entry in index.json contains:
FieldSource
titlePage title
descriptiondescription frontmatter
contentFull rendered HTML
imageimage frontmatter
permalinkAbsolute URL to the page

​
Search Behaviour

  • Scope — all pages under content/ are indexed, including blog posts, gallery entries, and any other regular content.
  • Drafts — pages marked draft: true are excluded from Hugo builds and therefore never appear in index.json.
  • Matching — the query is matched case-insensitively against title, description, and content. A page is included in results if any of those fields contain the query string.
  • Results UI — matching results are shown as a dropdown card list below the search box. Each card links to the matching page and shows its title and description.
Keep description frontmatter filled in on your blog posts. The search results dropdown displays the description as a summary, giving readers better context before they click through.
The search index is fetched once per search session and cached in memory for subsequent queries on the same page load. Navigating to a new page resets the cache.

Build docs developers (and LLMs) love

Get started for freeTalk to us