Deploy Hugo to thin.host

Build a Hugo site to public/ with the right baseURL and publish it to thin.host. thin.host serves the static files and gives you a live URL right away. Your agent can do every step for you through the thin.host MCP server, or you can run one curl command.

At a glance

Before you start

• Requires: A recent Hugo release (the quick start asks for v0.158.0 or later).
• A thin.host account. Sign up, then create an API key under Settings (for curl and the local MCP server), or connect your agent with OAuth as shown in Quickstart (MCP).

Create a project (skip if you have one)

hugo new project my-site

Set the base path

Until a domain points at it, a thin.host site lives under a sub-path: https://thin.host/s/<slug>/. Hugo builds links from baseURL, which must include the protocol and end with a slash. Keep your custom domain in the config and override it on the command line for the preview build.

# hugo.toml
baseURL = 'https://www.example.com/'

Pick the slug (my-site here) before you build the preview, and pass the same slug when you deploy.

Build

hugo --cleanDestinationDir --minify

The finished site is in public/. That folder is what you deploy.

Deploy from your agent (MCP)

Connect thin.host to Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex or ChatGPT once (setup for each client), then ask:

Build this Hugo project for thin.host with the slug my-site and publish the public/ folder.

With the local server (uvx thinhost-mcp) the agent runs the build and calls publish_website with the absolute path of public/; large builds are split across requests automatically. Later changes go out with update_website and sync=true, which also removes files the new build dropped.

The hosted connector (https://thin.host/mcp, used by claude.ai and ChatGPT) cannot read your disk. From a coding agent it uploads with the REST call below; otherwise it publishes from a public link to a zip or HTML file with publish_website_from_url.

Deploy with curl

cd public && zip -r ../site.zip . && cd -
curl -F file=@site.zip -F title="My Hugo site" -F slug=my-site \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/archive

The JSON response includes url, the live address (https://thin.host/s/my-site/). To redeploy, upload the new zip to the site's archive endpoint; pages and assets missing from it are removed:

curl -F file=@site.zip \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $THINHOST_API_KEY" \
  https://thin.host/v1/websites/my-site/archive

A single upload can be up to 30 MB. See the REST API reference for every field.

Add a custom domain

1. Open the site in the dashboard and add your hostname under Custom Domains, for example www.example.com. A <name>.thin.host subdomain is free and works immediately.
2. Create the DNS record the dashboard shows: a CNAME pointing at cname.thin.host. TLS is issued automatically once DNS resolves.
3. Rebuild with the base path / (hugo --cleanDestinationDir --minify) and redeploy.

Pages on a custom domain get a canonical tag, a generated robots.txt and a sitemap.xml.

Hugo notes

• In templates, call relURL and absURL without a leading slash: relURL "style.css" keeps the sub-path, relURL "/style.css" drops it.
• Hugo does not empty public/ before building; --cleanDestinationDir keeps old pages out of the zip.

FAQ

Sources

Commands and options checked against the official Hugo docs on 2026-10-14:

• Hugo: Host and deploy
• Hugo: Configuration (baseURL)
• Hugo: hugo command
• Hugo: relURL

Other frameworks: all deploy guides. Coming from another host? Compare thin.host.