# Share a Hugo Site Preview — Send the `public/` Folder as a Link

Canonical: https://commareports.com/share-hugo-site
Published: 2026-08-30

> hugo builds public/ in milliseconds and then you need somewhere to put it just so one person can look. Publish the build to Comma for a private preview URL with comments.

# Share a Hugo site preview

Hugo builds in 40 milliseconds, and then you spend twenty minutes finding
somewhere to put the output so one colleague can look at it before you merge.

The options are all disproportionate: spin up a Netlify project for a
throwaway preview, configure a bucket, or keep `hugo server` running on your
machine and hope the person is in the same timezone.

## Publish the build

```bash
hugo --minify --baseURL / --relativeURLs
```

Drag `public/` (or a zip of it) into [the app](https://commareports.com/):

- `index.html` becomes the report body.
- CSS, JS, images and fonts upload as assets with their references rewritten
  to the uploaded copies — which is the step that fails when you open
  `public/index.html` from disk and every root-relative `/css/main.css`
  resolves against your filesystem.
- Scripts run inside a sandboxed iframe, so a search widget or a theme toggle
  keeps working.

`--relativeURLs` is worth the flag: a preview build should not assume the
hostname it will be served from.

## Private by default

A pre-launch site is not something to leave on a guessable URL. Every report
is private until you change it — team, email-domain gate, named reviewers, or
a [password-protected link](/password-protect-html-report) for a client. See
the [sharing model](/docs/sharing).

Which is one thing a quick static deploy usually does not give you without
extra work.

## Feedback lands on the page

The point of a preview is to collect corrections, and corrections in an email
are a to-do list you have to translate back into locations.

- **Anchored threads** on the paragraph, the image, the nav item — see
  [commenting on HTML](/comment-on-html).
- **Revisions** — rebuild and PATCH the same report id, and the reviewer sees
  the new build at the URL they already have, with the old one still there.
- **An agent can read the comments back** through [MCP](/docs/mcp) if the one
  making the edits is Claude Code rather than you.

## Limits

- **Entry HTML: 5 MB.** Assets: 25 MB per file, **250 MB and 500 files
  total** — a content-heavy Hugo site with a page per tag can exceed 500
  files. Publish a section, or build with a narrowed content directory, when
  the point is review rather than a full mirror.
- **60 requests/minute per token.**

## Try it

Comma is free — unlimited reports, unlimited commenters, unlimited revision
history.

**[Publish a site preview →](https://commareports.com/)**

### Related

- [Share a Docusaurus site](/share-docusaurus-site) · [Share an MkDocs site](/share-mkdocs-site)
- [Share a client-facing report](/share-html-file-with-client) · [Netlify Drop alternatives](/alternatives/netlify-drop-alternatives)
- [Password-protect a report](/password-protect-html-report) · [Host an HTML file](/host-html-file)