Hugo Timeout Not a Circular Loop in Shortcode

timed out initializing value. This is most likely a circular loop in a shortcode

I have been getting a few random build errors with Hugo on Netlify recently. This is a bit strange, since it builds fine on my local machine and on Github Actions. Re-running the same build also worked a few times. The build log on Netlify says the following:

Hugo Static Site Generator v0.59.1-D5DAB232/extended linux/amd64 BuildDate: 2019-10-31T15:28:09Z
Building sites …
Total in 25937 ms
Error: Error building site: "/opt/build/repo/content/article/2016-11-01-my-iot-exploration-part-2-raspberry-pi-sense-hat/index.md:1:1": 
timed out initializing value. This is most likely a circular loop in a shortcode

The timeout part is correct, but the guess about a loop in a shortcode is not. I recently added image processing and I’m doing that in a shortcode, so it was pretty clear this problem was related to that.

The actual problem is that the build with image processing takes longer than 10 seconds, which it the default timeout for a build. Increasing the timeout in my config.toml solved the problem:

timeout = 60000

Update: I mention that this was caused by adding image processing, but when you do that you should commit the generated images files to source control, according to Hugo’s documentation for image processing. I hadn’t done that, and that’s why the builds were suddenly taking a lot longer than before.