A better way to clean Hugo's public directory
I had
previously mentioned
the script I use to build and deploy my Hugo website. Among
other things, it checked if a public folder existed in a
determined path and proceeded to delete it with
rm -rf
.
That works fine and it’s not much of a hassle but I just
found out that Hugo already has an option that does that. The
option in question is cleanDestinationDir
and can
either be used as a flag in conjunction with the
hugo
command or added to the website’s config
file. I am going with the latter.
When building a website with this flag, all public files will be deleted, but static and hidden folders will remain intact. This is especially useful if the public directory is also a Git repository. Additionally, licenses, readmes and other such files should be added to the static folder to avoid deletion.