Theme Overrides

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The principle

The vendored theme in _vendor/ is never edited. Hugo resolves templates by looking in the site’s own layouts/ before the theme’s, so a file at the same relative path shadows its theme counterpart. Customization happens by shadowing; the vendored copy stays pristine, and hugo mod vendor can regenerate it at any time without losing anything.

The cost of a shadow is that it copies theme markup at a point in time. When the theme upgrades, the shadow silently keeps the old markup until it is reconciled by hand, which is why the upgrade steps include a re-diff of every override.

Theme on Werk Space

Theme Overrides

The principle