Stranger things with Netlify and Hugo

I recently ran into a strange situation where Netlify was rendering my Hugo static site differently to when I ran hugo locally from my laptop.

After several re-builds on Netlify with and without the cache I tracked the issue down to a version mismatch - locally I was running Hugo v0.19, and Netlify was running something else. Netlify offer specific commands for each version and so by switching Netlify to use the hugo_0.19 command, everything was back to normal.

The Hosting Hugo on Netlify post had led me to think that the hugo alias would track the latest Hugo release, but it turns out for backwards compatibility reasons this isn’t the case and for Hugo builds using the hugo command it will build using Hugo v0.17.