Hugo Pipes is Hugo’s built-in asset processing pipeline. It handles Sass/SCSS compilation, CSS and JavaScript minification, fingerprinting for cache busting, and bundling — at build time, without external build tools like Webpack or Vite. For publishers running Hugo sites, understanding Pipes is the difference between manually managing compiled CSS and having the build handle it automatically. The Assets Directory Hugo Pipes works with files in the assets/ directory. Unlike static/, which copies files verbatim to the output, assets/ is a processing source — files there are available to Pipes functions but are only written to the output if explicitly processed and referenced.