So I’ve run into this error everytime I’ve cloned my site or pretty much any Hugo template, but it was really annoying for me when it comes to my personal blog, I would clone my private git repo and try to build my site and I would see the below error message

WARN 2024/02/06 07:26:21 found no layout file for "html" for kind "page": You should create a template file which matches Hugo Layouts Lookup Rules for this combination.

So this time I sat down to figure out what was going on and fix this once and for all, I hope. Well after a quick Google I found the solution, we just have to do the following after cloning my repo, or probably any other Hugo repo that has a template.

git submodule init
git submodule update

hugo server -D  #serve up our site in dev mode and load draft posts

That’s it all those errors should go away. Git submodules are a bit of a black box to me that I need to do some more research on.

Well just a quick post to start off the new year, hopefully this helps someone from spending hours trying to figure out what’s wrong.

• Hugo