How do I let someone review a Hugo site without deploying it?

Run `hugo` to build `public/`, then drag that folder into Comma. You get a private URL that renders the built site — no Netlify project, no S3 bucket, no `hugo server` running on your laptop while they look.

Why not just send the public/ folder?

Because opening `public/index.html` from disk breaks the site: absolute root-relative URLs like `/css/main.css` resolve against the filesystem root, so the page loads unstyled with dead navigation.

Do I need to change baseURL?

Build with relative URLs — `hugo --baseURL / --relativeURLs` — or just publish the folder as-is and let the asset rewriting handle it. Relative URLs are the safer default for a preview build that will live at a path you did not choose.

Is the preview public?

Only if you make it. Reports are private by default; a preview can stay private, go to your team, be gated to your email domain, opened to named reviewers, or password-protected for a client.

Can the reviewer comment on the page itself?

Yes — that is the difference from a staging deploy. Threads anchor to the rendered content, so 'this headline is wrong' sits on the headline instead of arriving as a numbered list in an email.

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

hugo --minify --baseURL / --relativeURLs

Drag public/ (or a zip of it) into the app:

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 for a client. See the sharing model.

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.
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 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 →