problem

I'm writing a template for my posts (in layouts/_default/single.html) and want to be able to access the date field from its frontmatter. How can I use the date in my template.

solution

The date field is available to you via .Date in your template.

So to access it inside your template you could do

{{ .Date }}

If you weren't using this in a single layout but were instead using this in a list or something, you can still access the date field via .Date in the same way, assuming you set the context (accessed via .) to be of page type.

Here's an example of accessing the date field of a page while iterating over all pages in your site - you'll note that we can still access this in the same way because the range iterator implicitly sets its inner context to the current element in the iteration:

{{ range .Site.RegularPages }}
    My page published at: {{ .Date }}
{{ end }}