Goal

In a hugo static site, sort a list of content by a computed field - a field not set explicitly in a page’s frontmatter.

Page front matter which looks like this:

---
title: "Post No. 3"
date: 2018-10-01T20:53:20-07:00
distance_miles: 21.77
time_minutes: 5
---

I wanted to divide distance_miles by time_minutes and then sort my pages by that.

Sorting

There is plenty of documentation on how to order content, and also how to sort data structures in Hugo. Hugo’s documentation is generally excellent. There is also a very active discourse with lots of question and answer content.

You can get a range of pages sorted by common metadata like last modified date, title, or length. And you can also sort by arbitrary parameters in your content front matter.

However, none of these usages were what I needed. I wanted to compute a dynamic value based on some static values in page front matter, then sort the list of pages by the computed value.

Scratch

Most complex things in Hugo I’ve found can be solved with scratch. There is a page linked from the hugo docs which does a very exhaustive look at the scratch feature.

One particular comment on discourse unlocked the usage of scratch I was looking for. The problem in that thread is not an exact match of mine, but it showed a very clever scratch usage.

Solution

My list template renders an HTML table with a row per page. I’ll cover the key parts of the solution.

My speed calculation:

$speed := div .Params.distance_miles .Params.time_minutes

My intermediate structure to hold all pages, each with a computed speed value:

$.Scratch.Add "enriched" (slice (dict "page" . "speed" $speed))

As we iterate over each page in my site, I compute the $speed value and then assemble a slice of dicts. Each dict in the slice has two fields: page and speed. Page holds the entire page object so we can access it later once we’ve sorted the slice. More information on the context dot . can be found on another excellent post.

Then we range over the sorted slice:

range sort ($.Scratch.Get "enriched") ".speed" "desc"

This ($.Scratch.Get "enriched") accesses the slice containing all of the dicts we built above. And we are sorting by a field on the dict .speed, which contains the computed speed value.

Appendix

example code