Advanced Customisation

3 mins·

There are a few ways you can make style changes to Congo.

Colour schemes #

Congo ships with a number of colour schemes out of the box. To change the basic colour scheme, you can set the colorScheme theme parameter. Refer to the Getting Started section to learn more about the built-in schemes.

In addition to the default schemes, you can also create your own and re-style the entire website to your liking. Schemes are created by by placing a <scheme-name>.css file in the assets/css/schemes/ folder. Once the file is created, simply refer to it by name in the theme configuration.

Congo defines a three-colour palette that is used throughout the theme. The three colours are defined as neutral, primary and secondary variants, each containing ten shades of colour.

Use one of the existing theme stylesheets as a template. You are free to define your own colours, but for some inspiration, check out the official Tailwind colour palette reference.

Overriding the stylesheet #

Sometimes you need to add a custom style to style your own HTML elements. Congo provides for this scenario by allowing you to override the default styles in your own CSS stylesheet. Simply create a custom.css file in your project’s assets/css/ folder.

The custom.css file will be minified by Hugo and loaded automatically after all the other theme styles which means anything in your custom file will take precedence over the defaults.

Building from source #

If you’d like to make a major change, you can take advantage of Tailwind CSS’s JIT compiler and rebuild the entire theme CSS from scratch.

Note: Building the theme manually is intended for advanced users.

Change into the themes/congo/ folder and install the project dependencies.

npm install

Once installed, you can edit the themes/congo/tailwind.config.js to change the styles that are applied throughout the theme. You can also adjust specific styles in themes/congo/assets/css/main.css.

To allow for easy theme colour changes, Congo defines a three-colour palette that is used throughout the theme. The three colours are defined as neutral, primary and secondary variants, each containing ten shades of colour. In order to change the colour across the entire theme, simply edit the tailwind.config.js file accordingly.

For a full list of colours available, and their corresponding configuration values, see the official Tailwind docs.

After editing the configuration, you need to rebuild the theme’s stylesheets. This will run the Tailwind JIT compiler in watch mode which aids with testing style changes.

npm run dev

This will automatically output a CSS file to /themes/congo/assets/css/compiled/main.css.

Note: You should not make manual edits to the compiled CSS file.

Now whenever you make a change, the CSS files will be rebuilt automatically. This mode is useful to run when using hugo server to preview your site during development. Asset files will be minified by Hugo at site build time.