How to fix Hugo on AWS Amplify

When I was building this site, I saw several warnings in the AWS console during deployment saying that my theme was not supported by this version of Hugo. I found this odd as the site built fine on my local machine, but didn’t go in-depth, as everything worked anyway. But after I moved to a new theme, AWS was failing to build it. Logs have been still pointing at Hugo version.

As I was unfamiliar with AWS and Amplify in particular, I went to Google (or to SearX, to be precise) and stumbled upon this article. Apparently, AWS has its own repository and they don’t feel like updating it often. As in the author’s article, Hugo version on my host was extremely old:

2023-03-08T15:34:24.150Z [INFO]: Hugo Static Site Generator v0.75.1-A4A7BAB7 linux/amd64
BuildDate: 2020-09-15T06:46:04Z

For comparison: the latest version is 0.111.2.

Although the author did a great job with their fix, I needed newer and extended version of hugo, so I edited their build settings to suit my needs. Here are two options for extended and normal versions of Hugo:

Latest Hugo extended:

version: 1
frontend:
  phases:
    build:
      commands:
        - echo $(hugo version)
        - wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.111.2/hugo_extended_0.111.2_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
        - tar -xf hugo_extended_0.111.2_Linux-64bit.tar.gz hugo
        - mv hugo /usr/bin/hugo
        - rm -rf hugo_extended_0.111.2_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
        - hugo
  artifacts:
    baseDirectory: public
    files:
      - '**/*'
  cache:
    paths: []

Latest Hugo standard:

version: 1
frontend:
  phases:
    build:
      commands:
        - echo $(hugo version)
        - wget https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo/releases/download/v0.111.2/hugo_0.111.2_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
        - tar -xf hugo_0.111.2_Linux-64bit.tar.gz hugo
        - mv hugo /usr/bin/hugo
        - rm -rf hugo_extended_Linux-64bit.tar.gz
        - hugo
  artifacts:
    baseDirectory: public
    files:
      - '**/*'
  cache:
    paths: []