Measured on real domains over real certificates, Remark42 on one registrable domain and the host page on another, with a control cookie behind every blocked column so a run that blocks nothing cannot report a pass. Three results the manual did not carry. Safari blocks third-party cookies out of the box, so AUTH_SAME_SITE=none on its own has already stopped working there, which makes the old recipe broken today and not deprecated later. Firefox reaches a working session by a weaker route than Chrome and Safari do: it accepts the server's attribute-less cookie, and because that cookie is HttpOnly the browser then forbids the widget's script from replacing it, so the session rides on an ordinary unpartitioned third-party cookie even with the header flag on. And Firefox's block-all setting discards partitioned cookies too, so no configuration survives it. Two parameter descriptions were wrong in ways that matter here. AUTH_SAME_SITE default emits no SameSite attribute rather than Lax, which is precisely what lets the widget's own cookie land on Chrome and Safari. And AUTH_TTL_COOKIE does not govern the cookie that carries the session under the header flag, since the frontend hardcodes 200h to mirror the default.
Remark42 site
Sources for remark42.com, built with Hugo.
Requirements
Hugo, the plain build; nothing here needs the extended one. The version the published image builds with is ARG HUGO_VERSION in Dockerfile, and any release at or above it works locally. Nothing updates that pin automatically: Dependabot's docker ecosystem reads FROM references, and the Hugo version is a bare string in a download URL, so bumping it is a manual edit. brew install hugo, or see the installation guide. Nothing else: no Node, no package manager.
Development
hugo server
Serves the site on http://localhost:1313 and rebuilds on change.
Alternatively, without installing Hugo:
docker compose up
Build
hugo --minify --cleanDestinationDir --destination build
Writes the static site to build/, which is what the Docker image serves. --cleanDestinationDir matters on a rebuild: without it a page you deleted, and the fingerprinted stylesheets of earlier builds, stay behind.
Layout
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
content/ |
Pages as markdown. content/docs/ is the documentation tree |
layouts/ |
Templates. partials/, shortcodes/ and _markup/ render hooks |
assets/ |
styles.css and the scripts, fingerprinted at build time |
static/ |
Files copied to the site root as-is: favicons, manifest, robots.txt |
data/nav.json |
The documentation sidebar |
hugo.toml |
Site configuration |
Writing docs
A page is a markdown file with a title in its front matter. A directory becomes a section when it holds _index.md, and a page that carries its own images is a directory with index.md and the images beside it.
Adding a page to the sidebar means adding an entry to data/nav.json; the paths there are relative to /docs.
Callouts use the note shortcode, which takes the emoji to show:
{{< note "💡" >}}
Anything markdown here.
{{< /note >}}
Two documentation pages are symlinked into the repository as backend/README.md and frontend/apps/remark42/README.md, so moving or renaming content/docs/contributing/backend/index.md or content/docs/contributing/frontend/index.md means repointing those symlinks.
Styling
assets/styles.css is hand-written, with the palette and light/dark values as custom properties at the top. The dark theme is applied by a dark class on <html>, set before first paint by assets/inline.js and toggled by assets/script.js.
Code highlighting is Hugo's built-in Chroma. The rules at the end of the stylesheet come from hugo gen chromastyles --style=github and --style=github-dark.
Dates
The "Updated" line on a documentation page comes from .Lastmod. hugo.toml resolves it through [frontmatter] lastmod, which tries git, then a lastmod in the page's front matter, then the file's modification time; without that chain it would resolve to .Date and every page would read Jan 01, 0001. A deployed page therefore shows the build date, since a checkout does not preserve modification times.
HUGO_ENABLEGITINFO=true hugo gives real per-page commit dates. It is off by default because the image build context is site/ alone, where there is no .git for Hugo to read and it fails rather than falling back.