Since the upgrade to a Hugo version above 0.75.0 there is an enhancement in the form of the command hugo mod npm pack to merge the node dependencies of a theme with those of a project.
To use this new feature, the dependencies of a theme must be saved in a file package.hugo.json instead of package.json, it is sufficient to simply rename the file created by npm or yarn. A symlink alone doesn’t work because Hugo’s virtual filesystem (intentionally) doesn’t work with symlinks.
If it’s just about merging the dependencies and devDependencies sections, that works very well. However, if you have defined special scripts (section scripts in package.json), e.g. to patch existing node libraries, the whole thing does not really help, because these sections (and all others that do not explicitly define dependencies) contribute the merge ignored.
There is a [Hugo Feature Request] (https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/issues/8319), but it is not yet clear whether and if so, when this will be implemented.
Two solutions are possible:
- Create a patched Node dependency and publish it to it’s own Node package repository - One can use GitHub for building and distribution. Just make sure your project is using this registry.
- Build your own merging logic using
jq:
An example for two files:
jq -s '.[0] * .[1]' package.hugo.json themes/some-hugo-theme-with-npm-dependencies/package.hugo.json
An Example using multiple themes (This only works with BSD find - not on GitHub):
find . -name "package.hugo.json" -o -name "package.json" -depth 0 | xargs jq -s add > package.json