Home

Lotus Docs is an easily updated and customisable Hugo theme for building fast, secure and SEO-friendly documentation sites.

📖 Table of contents

Quickstart

Landing Page

Shortcodes

Search

Analytics

Configuration

🚀 Getting Started

Requirements

• Hugo extended (minimum version: 0.121.0)
• git
• Go (minimum version v1.20)

Initialize site as Hugo Module

The Lotus Docs theme makes use of the Hugo Bootstrap Module. For this reason it's necessary to initialize your site as a Hugo Module:

hugo new site example
cd example
hugo mod init github.com/<username>/<your-hugo-site-name>

Install Options

The Lotus Docs theme can be installed using one of the following methods:

• As a Hugo Module (recommended)
• As a Git submodule
• Clone the theme files locally

Install as a Hugo Module (recommended)

Edit the hugo.toml configuration file to include the Lotus Docs theme and the Hugo Bootstrap Module as modules:

baseURL = 'http://example.com/'
languageCode = 'en-us'
title = 'My New Hugo Site'

[module]
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs"
        disable = false
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo-mod-bootstrap-scss/v5"
        disable = false

Install as a Git Submodule

From the root of your project run the following git commands:

git init
git submodule add https://github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs themes/lotusdocs

Edit the hugo.toml config file:

baseURL = 'http://example.org/'
languageCode = 'en-us'
title = 'My New Hugo Site'

[module]
    # uncomment line below for temporary local development of module
    # or when using a 'theme' as a git submodule
    replacements = "github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs -> lotusdocs"
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs"
        disable = false
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "github.com/gohugoio/hugo-mod-bootstrap-scss/v5"
        disable = false

Install Locally

There may be cases where you prefer to customize and maintain the Lotus Docs theme yourself. In such cases, use git to clone the theme into the themes/lotusdocs directory:

git clone https://github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs themes/lotusdocs

Edit the hugo.toml config file:

baseURL = 'http://example.org/'
languageCode = 'en-us'
title = 'My New Hugo Site'

[module]
    # uncomment line below for temporary local development of module,
    # when using a 'theme' as a git submodule or git cloned files
    replacements = "github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs -> lotusdocs"
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "github.com/colllijo/lotusdocs"
        disable = false
    [[module.imports]]
        path = "github.com/gohugoio/hugo-mod-bootstrap-scss/v5"
        disable = false

Create New Content

Navigate to the root of your Hugo project and use the hugo new command to create a file in the content/docs directory:

hugo new docs/example-page.md

This will create a markdown file named example-page.md with the following default front matter:

---
title: "Example Page"
description: ""
icon: "article"
date: "2023-05-22T00:27:57+01:00"
lastmod: "2023-05-22T00:27:57+01:00"
draft: false
toc: true
weight: 999
---

Modify the above front matter options to suit your needs.

Preview your site locally

Now that you've created some sample content you can preview your new Lotus Docs site using the huge server command:

hugo server -D

Navigate to localhost:1313/docs/ and you should see a card link to the Example Page created earlier: