Configure cascade

You can configure your site to cascade front matter values to the home page and any of its descendants. However, this cascading will be prevented if the descendant already defines the field, or if a closer ancestor node has already cascaded a value for the same field through its front matter's cascade key.

[!note] You can also configure cascading behavior within a page's front matter. See details.

For example, to cascade the color page parameter to all pages:

{{< code-toggle file=hugo >}} [cascade.params] color = 'red' {{< /code-toggle >}}

Target

<!-- TODO We deprecated the `_target` front matter key in favor of `target` in v0.156.0 on 2026-02-17. Remove footnote #1 on or after 2027-05-17 (15 months after deprecation). -->

The target key accepts a page matcher to limit cascaded values to a subset of pages.¹ If a target is omitted, values cascade to all pages.

{{% include "/_common/configuration/page-matcher.md" %}}

For example, to cascade the color page parameter to the articles section and its descendants, but only for the English (en) and German (de) language sites:

{{< code-toggle file=hugo >}} [cascade.params] color = 'red' [cascade.target] path = '{/articles,/articles/**}' [cascade.target.sites.matrix] languages = '{en,de}' {{< /code-toggle >}}

Array

Define an array of cascade maps to apply different values to different targets. For example:

{{< code-toggle file=hugo >}} [[cascade]] [cascade.params] color = 'red' [cascade.target] path = '{/articles,/articles/}' [[cascade]] [cascade.params] color = 'blue' [cascade.target] path = '{/tutorials,/tutorials/}' {{< /code-toggle >}}

Footnotes

1. The _target alias for target is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. ↩