How to group posts by date Daring Fireball style in Hugo

I’ve made a couple of updates to this site in an effort to avoid things getting too cluttered now that I’ve added micro-posts. A change that may be of interest to others who use Hugo to generate their site is that I’ve updated the home page to group posts by the day they were published. Doing so avoids any repetition if I publish multiple things in any one day.

The logic is fairly straightforward: If the post being processed was published on the same day as the post that was processed just before it, don’t show the date. Otherwise, show the date.

Hugo provides a handy .Scratch function for creating page-scoped variables. By updating the value of a .Scratch variable with the date of the current post being processed after the logic takes place, we can retrieve what will then be the date of the previous post in the next loop.

Here’s how all of the above translates to code:

{{ if ne ($.Scratch.Get "lastPostsDate") (.Date.Format "2 January 2006") }}
    <div class="meta-day">
        {{ .Date.Format "2 January 2006" }}
    </div>
{{ end }}

{{ $.Scratch.Set "lastPostsDate" (.Date.Format "2 January 2006") }}

That snippet should go inside the posts loop , so you’ll end up with something like this:

<div class="article-list">
    {{ $paginator := .Paginate (where .Data.Pages "Type" "post") }}

    {{ range $paginator.Pages }}
        <!-- Date logic... -->

        <article class="article">
            <!-- Structure of a single post in the list... -->
        </article>
    {{ end }}
</div>