TEMPLATES

Partial Templates

Partial Template Lookup Order

Partial templates—like single page templates and list page templates—have a specific lookup order. However, partials are simpler in that Hugo will only check in two places:

  1. layouts/partials/*<PARTIALNAME>.html
  2. themes/<THEME>/layouts/partials/*<PARTIALNAME>.html

This allows a theme’s end user to copy a partial’s contents into a file of the same name for further customization.

Use Partials in your Templates

All partials for your Hugo project are located in a single layouts/partials directory. For better organization, you can create multiple subdirectories within partials as well:

.
└── layouts
    └── partials
        ├── footer
        │   ├── scripts.html
        │   └── site-footer.html
        ├── head
        │   ├── favicons.html
        │   ├── metadata.html
        │   ├── prerender.html
        │   └── twitter.html
        └── header
            ├── site-header.html
            └── site-nav.html

All partials are called within your templates using the following pattern:

{{ partial "<PATH>/<PARTIAL>.html" . }}

As shown in the above example directory structure, you can nest your directories within partials for better source organization. You only need to call the nested partial’s path relative to the partials directory:

{{ partial "header/site-header.html" . }}
{{ partial "footer/scripts.html" . }}

Variable Scoping

The second argument in a partial call is the variable being passed down. The above examples are passing the ., which tells the template receiving the partial to apply the current context.

This means the partial will only be able to access those variables. The partial is isolated and has no access to the outer scope. From within the partial, $.Var is equivalent to .Var.

Returning a value from a Partial

In addition to outputting markup, partials can be used to return a value of any type. In order to return a value, a partial must include a lone return statement.

Inline partials

You can also define partials inline in the template. But remember that template namespace is global, so you need to make sure that the names are unique to avoid conflicts.

Value: {{ partial "my-inline-partial" . }}

{{ define "partials/my-inline-partial" }}
{{ $value := 32 }}
{{ return $value }}
{{ end }}

Example GetFeatured 

{{/* layouts/partials/GetFeatured.html */}}
{{ return first . (where site.RegularPages ".Params.featured" true) }}

{{/* layouts/index.html */}}
{{ range partial "GetFeatured.html" 5 }}
  [...]
{{ end }}

Example GetImage 

{{/* layouts/partials/GetImage.html */}}
{{ $image := false }}
{{ with .Params.gallery }}
  {{ $image = index . 0 }}
{{ end }}
{{ with .Params.image }}
  {{ $image = . }}
{{ end }}
{{ return $image }}

{{/* layouts/_default/single.html */}}
{{ with partial "GetImage.html" . }}
  [...]
{{ end }}

Cached Partials

The partialCached template function can offer significant performance gains for complex templates that don’t need to be re-rendered on every invocation. The simplest usage is as follows:

{{ partialCached "footer.html" . }}

You can also pass additional parameters to partialCached to create variants of the cached partial.

For example, you can tell Hugo to only render the partial footer.html once per section:

{{ partialCached "footer.html" . .Section }}

If you need to pass additional parameters to create unique variants, you can pass as many variant parameters as you need:

{{ partialCached "footer.html" . .Params.country .Params.province }}

Note that the variant parameters are not made available to the underlying partial template. They are only use to create a unique cache key.

Example header.html

The following header.html partial template is used for spf13.com:

layouts/partials/header.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html class="no-js" lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns# fb: http://ogp.me/ns/fb#">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">

    {{ partial "meta.html" . }}

    <base href="{{ .Site.BaseURL }}">
    <title> {{ .Title }} : spf13.com </title>
    <link rel="canonical" href="{{ .Permalink }}">
    {{ if .RSSLink }}<link href="{{ .RSSLink }}" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="{{ .Title }}" />{{ end }}

    {{ partial "head_includes.html" . }}
</head>
<body lang="en">

Example footer.html

The following footer.html partial template is used for spf13.com:

layouts/partials/footer.html

<footer>
  <div>
    <p>
    &copy; 2013-14 Steve Francia.
    <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/" title="Creative Commons Attribution">Some rights reserved</a>;
    please attribute properly and link back.
    </p>
  </div>
</footer>

See Also

“Partial Templates” was last updated: July 1, 2020: Add support for inline partials (d71ed99d3)
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