Depending on your deployment choice you may want to serve your site locally during development to preview content changes. To serve your site locally:

1. Ensure you have an up to date local copy of your site files cloned from your repo.

2. Ensure Hugo Extended and any source-fetch tools required by your chosen installation method are installed, as described in Prerequisites and installation. Node.js and PostCSS are not site-build prerequisites.

3. Run the hugo server command in your site root. By default your site will be available at http://localhost:1313.

Now that you’re serving your site locally, Hugo will watch for changes to the content and automatically refresh your site. If you have more than one local git branch, when you switch between git branches the local website reflects the files in the current branch.