Hugo no existing content direction configured

October 17, 2023 (Last Modified: November 30, 2023)

If you receive an error similar to the following:

$ hugo new content about.md
Error: no existing content directory configured for this project

take a look at your hugo.toml or in new setups, config/_default/hugo.yaml. In there, you should see a variable for contentDir such as:

######################## i18n ####################
# Auto-detect Chinese/Japanese/Korean Languages in the content. see: https://gohugo.io/getting-started/configuration/#hascjklanguage
hasCJKLanguage: false
# Set default content directory for multilingual
contentDir: content/en/
# Set fallback if international version is not available
defaultContentLanguage: en
# Set the default language as the root rather than in folder i.e. don't use /en/
defaultContentLanguageInSubdir: false

Here you can see my contentDir is setup as en in preparation for a multilingual site. It’s not a bad practice so I kept it and resolved the error with the following:

$ mkdir content/en
$ hugo new content/en/about.md

That should do it!