How to Serve Your Hugo Site on a Local Network

Sometimes it’s useful to check how a Hugo site looks on a real mobile device before deploying. That requires serving the site on a local network so other devices on that network can access it. Here’s the command to serve a Hugo site on a local network:

hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0 --baseURL 

Then open http://:1313 on your phone. The site should load and work as expected.

The --bind 0.0.0.0 option is necessary because Hugo binds itself to 127.0.0.1 by default, which means no other devices except the one serving the site would be able to reach said site.

The --baseURL option is needed so that links generated in the Hugo site all point to the local IP address the site is being served from. Otherwise, the links will be generated with localhost:1313.

Note that if you’re on public wifi this command may not work due to client isolation!

If you need to get your local IP address, here are a few methods depending on your operating system.

On macOS, try running:

ipconfig getifaddr en0

If it returns nothing, try en1 instead.

On Linux, try this command. The first address is usually the one you need:

hostname -I

On Windows, try this command. Look for “IPv4 Address”:

ipconfig

I felt the need to write this post because I tried this command that worked for loading the home page on my phone, but everything else was broken. I couldn’t tell if I was doing something wrong or if there was something wrong with Hugo.

hugo server --bind 0.0.0.0

With this command, the home page loaded on my mobile device on the same local network, but clicking on any links to other pages of the site resulted in a connection error. That’s because the links are all generated with localhost:1313, which means the device tries to connect to itself and the Hugo server is running on a separate device. Using --baseURL is necessary to get past this.