Hugo Boss 💪

Hugo bloggin' with Obsidian like a boss. Preview, publish, and deploy your Hugo blog without leaving your editor.

Remember when people used to say boss, when they were describing something that was really cool? Like:

"Those shoulder pads are really boss, man."

"Look at that perm, that perm is so boss."

It's what made me want to become a boss. And I looked so good in a perm and shoulder pads. But now, boss is just slang for jerk in charge.

– Michael Scott

Obsidian + Hugo

There are multiple ways to make Obsidian and Hugo play nice. I like to keep my Hugo site outside my Obsidian vault and symlink the content so I can write in Obsidian.

My Hugo site lives in: ~/src/jerodsanto/net

My Obsidian vault lives in: ~/Dropbox/obsidian/Jerod

So I created a symlink like so:

ln -s ~/src/jerodsanto/net/content/posts ~/Dropbox/obsidian/Jerod/blog

You could also create a new Obsidian vault that points directly at your Hugo content directory. This plugin should manage that setup just fine (I believe, haven't tested it).

Features

New Post

Create a new blog post with one click. Uses your configured template file, or falls back to a basic frontmatter structure if no template is specified.

Preview Site

Start a local Hugo server and preview your site in a split pane right inside Obsidian. The preview automatically opens to the current blog post you're editing, complete with Hugo's built-in live reload.

Publish Post

Prepare a draft for publishing with one click:

• Validates that the post has a title and content, if so:
• Moves the post to your configured publish path (default: YYYY/MM-slug)
• If there's embedded files, creates a page bundle and copies them to it
• Sets the date frontmatter to the current time
• Sets draft to false

Deploy Site

Build your Hugo site and deploy it with a configurable deploy command (e.g., rsync to a server)

Installation

From Obsidian Community Plugins

1. Open Settings → Community plugins
2. Search for "Hugo Boss"
3. Click Install, then Enable, then configure

Manual Installation

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release
2. Create a folder called hugo-boss in your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory
3. Copy the downloaded files into the hugo-boss folder
4. Enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins

Configuration

Open Settings → Hugo Boss to configure:

Setting	Description
Hugo site directory	Path to your Hugo site (supports ~ for home directory)
Obsidian Hugo directory	Where Obsidian stores your Hugo posts (leave empty for vault root)
Publish path	Path template for published posts (default: {YYYY}/{MM}-{slug})
Hugo binary	Path to the Hugo binary (leave empty to use system PATH)
Deploy command	Command to run after building (e.g., rsync -az public/ user@host:~/site/)
Draft template	Template to use for new posts (leave empty for basic frontmatter)

Publish Path Placeholders

Since Hugo doesn't care how you organize your content directory (it relies on frontmatter for permalinks, etc), you may choose where/how Hugo Boss moves your post into place to be published. I organize my directory by year and use the month in the post file names, so that's the default, but you can configure this however you like.

• {YYYY} - 4-digit year (e.g., 2026)
• {MM} - 2-digit month (e.g., 01)
• {DD} - 2-digit day (e.g., 15)
• {slug} - URL-friendly version of the title

Examples (assuming blog as your Hugo directory):

Publish Path	Result
{YYYY}/{MM}-{slug}	blog/2026/01-my-post.md (default)
{YYYY}/{slug}	blog/2026/my-post.md
{YYYY}/{MM}/{DD}-{slug}	blog/2026/01/16-my-post.md
{slug}	blog/my-post (flat structure)

Note: For posts that have embedded files, it will create a page bundle instead. For example, two images embedded in the post will result in the following:

Result
blog/2026/01-my-post/index.md
blog/2026/01-my-post/image1.jpg
blog/2026/01-my-post/image2.jpg

Usage

Click the flexed bicep icon in any editor view to access the menu:

• New Post - Create a new blog post
• Preview Site - Toggle the Hugo preview server
• Publish Post - Publish the current draft
• Deploy Site - Build and deploy your site

The button shows an active state (accent color) when the preview server is running.

Related Frontmatter

---
title: "My Post Title"
slug: "my-post-title"  # optional, derived from title if not set
draft: true            # set to false on publish
date: 2026-01-15T...   # set automatically on publish
---

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.0.0 or later
• Hugo installed on your system
• Desktop only (uses Node.js child_process for Hugo commands)

Building from Source

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/jerodsanto/hugo-boss.git
cd hugo-boss

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build the plugin
npm run build

# For development (rebuilds on file changes)
npm run dev

Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css to your vault's .obsidian/plugins/hugo-boss/ directory.

License

MIT

Author

Jerod Santo