Alpha is a Hugo theme designed for personal, text-first websites. It gives you a zero-distraction canvas while providing a professional, flexible engine that automatically handles SEO, social sharing, and layout details.
Whether you write blogs, essays, stories, or long-form content, Alpha feels less like a template and more like a writing partner.
Alpha isn’t just another Hugo theme. It’s built around three core principles:
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Worry-Free Writing with LiVa: Forget guessing about configuration or frontmatter mistakes. Alpha’s built-in LiVa validator gives instant feedback in your local dev environment, helping you get everything right the first time.
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A Stability Contract with Hugo: Updates to Hugo? No worries. Alpha defines a tested range of compatible Hugo versions and delivers updates that are safe and reliable. Focus on content, not maintenance.
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Guidance, Not Just Templates: Alpha includes a step-by-step Beginner’s Guide and comprehensive Reference Docs, so you always know what to do next.
- Flexible Layouts — Build pages easily using shortcodes without touching the theme code.
- Automated SEO Engine — Schema.org, Open Graph, and Twitter Cards handled automatically.
- Unobtrusive Design — Minimalist, accessible-first, and content-focused.
- Performance Optimized — Fast out-of-the-box with lightweight code.
- Modern Development — Optional Tailwind CSS mode for full customization.
- Built-in Integrations — Pagefind search and privacy-friendly GoatCounter analytics.
- Multilingual Support — Ready for content in multiple languages, including simplified Chinese.
New to Hugo? Follow "From Zero with Zero" for step-by-step guidance.
For detailed instructions, configuration, and examples, see the documentation.
- Git
- Hugo (
^0.146.1) - Node.js (optional, for Tailwind CSS)
- Go (only if using Hugo Module method)
Manual Setup — Option 1
- Download the Alpha Starter.
- Unzip and navigate into the folder:
cd alpha-starter
hugo server
Use GitHub template — Option 2
- Go to the Alpha Starter.
- Click the “Use this template” button to create a new repository.
- Clone your new repo locally a navigate into the repo folder and run:
cd YOUR-PROJECT-NAME
hugo serverGit Submodule — Option 1
git submodule add https://github.com/oxypteros/alpha.git themes/alphaIn your hugo.toml:
theme = "alpha"Hugo module — Option 2 (requires golang)
- Initialize your site as a module (if not already):
hugo mod init github.com/yourusername/yoursite- Add Alpha as a dependency:
hugo mod get github.com/oxypteros/alpha- Reference the theme in
hugo.toml:
theme = ["github.com/oxypteros/alpha"]Copy or download the
themes/alpha/config/_default/to your rootconfig/folder and merge carefully to avoid overwriting your existing setup.
This theme uses Semantic Versioning:
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
- MAJOR — Breaking changes, large reworks, changes incompatible with previous configurations, or significant updates required due to incompatible changes in upstream dependencies (like Hugo).
- MINOR — New features, enhancements, or content that is backward compatible.
- PATCH — Bug fixes, content tweaks, small updates, or non-breaking config changes.
Hugo Version Compatibility: Alpha is a "living theme", it evolves alongside Hugo itself. My goal is to adopt improvements and best practices from new Hugo releases as they become relevant and beneficial to the theme.
This means Alpha does not aim to stay locked to older Hugo versions. But to embrace modern Hugo capabilities to provide a better user and developer experience. If a theme update requires a new minimum Hugo version, this will be clearly noted in the documentation and in the changelog.
You can find all changes in CHANGELOG.md.
This theme is released under the MIT License.
