Hugo No Layout File Error

I set up a new work environment on a new machine. I wanted to do some blogging, so I did a git clone of my blog repo, wrote a quick article, and started up hugo server. But when I opened the dev URL, I was presented with a blank page. Weird, did I break my site?

I took a look at the hugo server log and noticed this error:

WARN 2022/07/03 19:37:17 found no layout file for "HTML" for kind "page": You should create a template file which matches Hugo Layouts Lookup Rules for this combination.

Hmm, no layout file? Well, what provides layouts for my blog? The theme does. And how do I get my theme? Through a git submodule!

When setting up my new environment, I forgot to pull in my theme through the git submodule.

Let’s fix that:

git submodule init
git submodule update

The submodule was initialized and updated successfully.

After stopping and starting the server again, everything loaded correctly. Always remember to pull your submodules!