Turning off Google Analytics for Local Hugo Server
April 3, 2020
Categories: Tags:TL;DR: If using Google Analytics, most Hugo themes load the tracking script even when running locally. This causes a bunch of bogus page views when writing a new article. Creating separate config files for development and production is an easy way to fix this.
![images/bogus-google-analytics.png](/posts/2020/04/hugo-google-analytics/images/bogus-google-analytics_hu402af685ef75de2e09b991f4befb7ed2_32766_700x500_fit_q85_box_3.png)
To solve this, take advantage of the fact that Hugo allows for specifying multiple configuration files. In this case, create a separate “production” config.toml
file without the googleAnalytics
code specified and rearrange the directory structure as follows:
├── config
│ ├── _default
│ │ └── config.toml
│ └── production
│ └── config.toml
When serving locally with hugo serve
the config in _default will be used, but when generating the site with hugo
, Hugo will default to the production configuration.
If you do want to test the production configuration locally, you can specify the environment via a command flag:
hugo serve --environment production
The full documentation for this feature can be found on the gohugo.io website.
I hope that helps anyone who encounters the same situation!