zola/docs/content/documentation/themes/installing-and-using-themes.md

+++ title = “Installing & using themes” weight = 20 +++

Installing a theme

The easiest way to install to theme is to clone its repository in the themes directory.

$ cd themes
$ git clone THEME_REPO_URL

Cloning the repository using Git or another VCS will allow you to easily update it but you can also simply download the files manually and paste them in a folder.

Using a theme

Now that you have the theme in your themes directory, you only need to tell Zola to use it to get started by setting the theme variable of the configuration file. The theme name has to be name of the directory you cloned the theme in. For example, if you cloned a theme in themes/simple-blog, the theme name to use in the configuration file is simple-blog.

Customizing a theme

Any file from the theme can be overriden by creating a file with the same path and name in your templates or static directory. Here are a few examples of that, assuming the theme name is simple-blog:

templates/pages/post.html -> replace themes/simple-blog/templates/pages/post.html
templates/macros.html -> replace themes/simple-blog/templates/macros.html
static/js/site.js -> replace themes/simple-blog/static/js/site.js

You can also choose to only parts of a page if a theme define some blocks by extending it. If we wanted to only change a single block from the post.html page in the example above, we could do the following:

{% extends "simple-blog/templates/pages/post.html" %}

{% block some_block %}
Some custom data
{% endblock %}

Most themes will also provide some variables that are meant to be overriden: this happens in the extra section of the configuration file. Let's say a theme uses a show_twitter variable and sets it to false by default. If you want to set it to true, you can update your config.toml like so:

[extra]
show_twitter = false

You can modify files directly in the themes directory but this will make updating the theme harder and live reload won't work with those files.