How to use the same layout in a different directory?

Question

I have a site using the hugo-coder theme, which has a layouts/posts folder that specifies that anything in the "posts" folder will have a blog post format.

I would like to have two different blogs in two different subdirectories, using the same layout. Is there a way to tell Hugo that the content/blog1 directory should use the same settings and layout as the content/posts directory without copying themes/hugo-coder/layouts/posts into layouts/blog1? Ideally I would avoid using symlinks, because, while convenient, I've had a decent amount of software throw weird errors when I use symlinks, so I avoid them when it's possible.

Answer 1

You can use a partial in your templates. If you do that you WILL need the single and list file in the layouts/blog directory, but it could be an empty file referencing the partial. The layouts/posts/single.html and the layouts/blog/single.html both will then look like this:

{{ partial "singleblog.html" . }}

Compeletely DRY... and without much complexity.

Answer 2

You can set the layout or type field to posts in the frontmatter of your _index.md file in content/blog1.

See this docs page for more info.

Edit: Alternatively, you could create an archetype for blog1 that automatically sets the value to posts in the frontmatter of individual posts in that section, assuming you're using hugo new blog1/postname.md to create posts for that section.

Double edit: The first suggestion didn't work. You could also create subsections within content/posts/blog1 and set the permalinks of posts in that subsection to use the last section only. That should remove the need to explicitly set the type in post frontmatter every time because each post would already have a type of posts.

In config.toml:

[permalinks]
    posts = "/:sections[last]/:slug/"