Add a Last Modified Date in Hugo Articles

Add date data to our Hugo posts

• Last Modified
• Last Updated
• Edited

Conditionally render a Last Modified date in the single.html template for our posts.

Published {{ .Date.UTC.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}
Last Modified {{ .Lastmod.UTC.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}

Use Hugo’s date and lastmod fields.

Two ways we go about this:

1. Automatically add lastmod field using Git metadata

Automatically add the lastmod field to each article based on Git information.

Update enableGitInfo in config.toml

Set enableGitInfo to true in our config.toml.

enableGitInfo = true

The lastmod field will default to the most recent commit date for that file in Git.

Update frontmatter in config.toml

If enableGitInfo is true, it will override any lastmod dates in front matter.

By default, :git comes before lastmod. To override add the following lines to the config file to config.toml

enableGitInfo = true

[frontmatter]
date = ["date", "publishDate", "lastmod"]
lastmod = ["lastmod", ":git", "date", "publishDate"]
publishDate = ["publishDate", "date"]
expiryDate = ["expiryDate"]

2. Manually add lastmod to front matter

Second approach is to manually add lastmod fields to front matter whenever an article is updated.

We want the Last Modified date to show only if we explicitly set it in the front matter.

Add lastmod to front matter

Add the lastmod field to our article front matter:

date: "2022-01-10"
lastmod: "2022-01-15"

Created a simple partial template

This partial template checks if the lastmod and publish dates are the same then renders the dates. Compare two dates, Jan 2, 2006 is equal to mm.dd.yyyy.

Create lastmod.html

{{ $date := .Date.UTC.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}
{{ $lastmod := .Lastmod.UTC.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}

<li class="list-inline-item d-flex align-items-center">
    <i class="fas fa-calendar me-2"></i>
    <span>Published on {{ $date }}</span>

<li class="list-inline-item d-flex align-items-center">
    <i class="fas fa-calendar me-2"></i>
    {{ if ne $lastmod $date }}
    <span> Edited on {{ $lastmod }}</span>
    {{ end }}
</li>

In single.html or post.html this can be called with the following {{ partial "lastmod.html" . }}

Summary

Minor update to improve information.

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