Documentation Writers' Toolkit Write Reuse Reuse directories of content

Reuse directories of content with Hugo mounts

Before Hugo performs a build, it reads the Hugo module mounts configuration to construct a virtual filesystem. Each mount mounts a source directory at a destination directory within that filesystem. You can use Hugo mounts to reuse a whole directory of content in another part of the published technical documentation.

Before you begin

• Identify a directory of content that you want to reuse.

• Identify any pages to exclude. Typically, excluded pages are ones that don’t make sense in the context of the target directory.

  Warning

  Pages in the directory might have relative links to other pages that would be broken by their exclusion.

  If the excluded page is replaced by another in the target directory, relative links continue to work.

  Otherwise, you should make the links absolute so that they always refer to the page in the source directory.

Steps

To reuse a shared directory:

1. Determine the source and target directories.

   The source directory is the path to a directory in the website repository. It always has the path prefix content/docs/. The source directory for all Grafana Cloud content at the URL https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/ is content/docs/grafana-cloud.

   Similarly, the target directory has the path prefix content/docs. For the destination URL https://grafana.com/docs/target-directory/, the path is content/docs/target-directory.

2. For every page in the source directory, set the canonical URL using the canonical front matter, to the published open source page URL.

   The canonical front matter indicates the preferred URL for duplicate or very similar pages. For more information, refer to Canonical.

3. Update the website repository Hugo configuration.

   The configuration is in the website repository in the config/_default/config.yaml file.

   Append the mount to the docs.manual_mount key in the YAML configuration.

   For example, mount the source content/docs/source-directory at content/docs/target-directory and exclude the content/docs/source-directory/_index.md file:

   yaml Copy

   - source: content/docs/source-directory
     target: content/docs/target-directory
     excludeFiles:
       - /_index.md