Adding chart.js to Hugo

I recently wanted to add some charts to a blog post and mermaid just wasn’t cutting it. Mermaid didn’t support the options I wanted to use and ultimately wasn’t flexible enough to show a horizontal bar chart with the customization options I wanted. So I went looking for alternatives… and that’s when I found this shen-yu/hugo-chart… layout? for hugo that adds Chart.js support. Chart.js is a great javascript library for creating many kinds of charts with many customization options. Perfect, I thought. As I started using shen/yu-hugo-chart to add chart.js to my site, a few things stood out to me:

• I felt like adding a “layout” and a new git submodule just for this was fairly extreme just to add support for a single javascript library.
• The documentation on the chart.js website didn’t match up with what was supported. I then realized that the hugo-chart plugin was using Chart.js version 2 when the latest released version was v4… a whole two major versions behind. Yikes. So not only would this add a new git submodule, which is annoying, but it wasn’t even up-to-date.

At this point, I was ready to throw the entire project aside and do my own thing. This is what I ended up with. It only requires a single file to add the new shortcode. So instead of having a git dependency, just add this file to your shortcodes.

Installation

Add this file at the path layouts/shortcodes/chart.html:

{{- if not (.Page.Scratch.Get "hasChartJS") -}}
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/chart.js"></script>
<script> Chart.defaults.color = '#fff'; </script>
{{- .Page.Scratch.Set "hasChartJS" true -}}
{{- end -}}

{{- $id := substr (md5 .Inner) 0 16 -}}
<div class="chart">
    <canvas id="{{ $id }}"></canvas>
</div>
<script>
    document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', () => {
        var ctx = document.getElementById('{{ $id }}')
        var options = {{ .Inner | chomp | safeJS }};
        new Chart(ctx, options);
    });
</script>

The .Page.Scratch.Set and .Page.Scratch.Get calls allows me to only have the <script> tag that imports chart.js a single time, which seems cleaner to me than importing it for each call to the chart shortcode.

Once this file is in place, you can now call the chart shortcode like this:

{{< chart >}}
{
  type: 'type',
  data: {...},
  options: {...}
}
{{< /chart >}}

and a chart will be generated using chart.js. A few full examples are below:

Line Chart

{{< chart >}}
{
  type: 'line',
  data: {
      labels: [
        'Jan',
        'Feb',
        'Mar',
        'Apr',
        'May',
        'June',
        'July'
      ],
    datasets: [{
      label: 'My First Dataset',
      data: [65, 59, 80, 81, 56, 55, 40],
      fill: false,
      borderColor: 'rgb(75, 192, 192)',
      tension: 0.1
    }]
  },
}
{{< /chart >}}

Bar Chart

{{< chart >}}
{
    type: 'bar',
    data: {
        labels: [
          'Dataset 1',
          'Dataset 2',
          'Dataset 3',
          'Dataset 4',
          'Dataset 5',
          'Dataset 6'
        ],
        datasets: [{
            label: 'units',
            data: [36, 50, 3, 36, 63, 79]
        }]
    },
    options: {
        indexAxis: 'y',
        plugins: {
            legend: {
                display: false
            },
            title: {
                display: true,
                text: 'Bar Chart title'
            }
        }
    }
}
{{< /chart >}}

Polar Area Chart

You can use any chart available in chart.js. Here’s a polar area chart:

{{< chart >}}
{
  type: 'polarArea',
  data: {
    labels: [
      'Red',
      'Green',
      'Yellow',
      'Grey',
      'Blue'
    ],
    datasets: [{
      label: 'My First Dataset',
      data: [11, 16, 7, 3, 14],
      backgroundColor: [
        'rgb(255, 99, 132)',
        'rgb(75, 192, 192)',
        'rgb(255, 205, 86)',
        'rgb(201, 203, 207)',
        'rgb(54, 162, 235)'
      ]
    }]
  },
  options: {}
}
{{< /chart >}}

Some other kinds

I’m going to spare you from giving an example of every type of chart. Please reference the official chart.js documentation to see all available options.

End

I introduced a way to add a fully up-to-date chart.js to your hugo website that avoids many of the downsides of existing solutions. If you liked this post, feel free to send me any comments or questions on mastodon!