A zero-build CSS pipeline for Hugo

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Systemone ships hand-written plain CSS. There is no Sass, no PostCSS, no Tailwind, and no Node build dependency — resources.Concat, resources.Minify and resources.Fingerprint are the only build tooling, and Hugo is already running them.

The theme’s head.html partial assembles the final stylesheet from an ordered list of files:

{{- $cssFiles := slice "css/reset.css" "css/tokens.css" "css/base.css" "css/prose.css" "css/a11y.css" -}}
{{- $cssResources := slice -}}
{{- range $cssFiles -}}
 {{- with resources.Get . -}}
 {{- $cssResources = $cssResources | append . -}}
 {{- end -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- $css := $cssResources | resources.Concat "css/systemone.css" -}}
{{- if hugo.IsProduction -}}
 {{- $css = $css | minify | fingerprint -}}
{{- end -}}

A small generated stylesheet, built from validated design.* params, is appended last so a site’s hugo.toml can override a handful of tokens without touching the theme’s own CSS files:

Css on Systemone Demo

A zero-build CSS pipeline for Hugo