Metalsmith VS tera

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG

I use Metalsmith. Been happy with it. I build my site into a self-contained nginx docker image.

const Metalsmith = require('metalsmith') const markdown = require('@metalsmith/markdown') const layouts = require('metalsmith-layouts') const permalinks = require('@metalsmith/permalinks') const collections = require('metalsmith-collections') Metalsmith(__dirname) .metadata({ sitename: 'Website Name', description: "Website description.", generator: 'Metalsmith', url: 'https://metalsmith.io/' }) .source('./src') .destination('./build') // .clean(true) .use( collections({ projects: 'pages/*.md', reverse: true, refer: true }) ) .use(markdown()) .use(permalinks()) .use( layouts({ engineOptions: { helpers: { formattedDate: function (date) { return new Date(date).toLocaleDateString() } } } }) ) .build(function (err, files) { if (err) throw err })

I also started to move to hugo, but they didn't merge the pr [2] which would have helped in the transition. :(

The look is still similar to what it was in the beginning, in terms of colors at least.

[1] https://github.com/metalsmith/metalsmith

Metalsmith

A static site generator I've been enjoying lately (and using for my blog) is Metalsmith: https://metalsmith.io/

It feel like it's the best of both worlds, because it's simple to learn and customize, but there are plugins for the things you don't want to spend time writing yourself.

For example, I'm using plugins to: check for broken links, generate an RSS feed, and run a test server with automatic reloading.

But then I was able to easily add in my own code to handle relative links, generate Graphviz diagrams, and format dates.

One other recommendation: I hated almost every template language I ran across (Hugo's, Liquid, Nunjucks, EJS), but I'm thrilled with the simplicity of Handlebars (https://handlebarsjs.com/), although it is a bit limiting and the "block helper with parameters" syntax is strange (perhaps an indicator that I'm trying to do too much in the templating language!).

I believe Metalsmith [1] is trying that approach

[1] https://metalsmith.io/

You can also use HTML templating with crates like askama, tera and maud! This can be combined with the power of lightweight JavaScript libraries like htmx to speed up time to production. You can read more about this on our other article about using HTMX with Rust which you can find here.. We also collaborated with Stefan Baumgartner on an article for serving HTML with Askama!

Tera, based on Jinja, as the next two

Tera

An authentication system is an integral part of modern applications. It's so important that almost all modern applications have some sort of it. Because of their critical nature, such systems should be secure and should follow OWAP®'s recommendations on web security and password hashing as well as storage to prevent attacks such as Preimage and Dictionary attacks (common to SHA algorithms). To demonstrate some of the recommendations, we'll be building a robust session-based authentication system in Rust and a complementary frontend application. For this article series, we'll be using Rust's actix-web and some awesome crates for the backend service. SvelteKit will be used for the frontend. It should be noted however that what we'll be building is largely framework agnostic. As a result, you can decide to opt for axum, rocket, warp or any other rust's web framework for the backend and react, vue or any other javascript framework for the frontend. You can even use rust's yew, seed or some templating engines such as MiniJinja or tera at the frontend. It's entirely up to you. Our focus will be more on the concepts.

Or Flask!

My guess is that "fastest" refers to the request-response loop.

I'd be interested in knowing how fast it is once you tack your favourite template rendering engine on top.

It would be nice if it supported Tera, the Rust template engine that is inspired by Jinja2:

https://github.com/Keats/tera

supports sophisticated templating using Tera,

As you might've noticed I have a static www folder with all my files. If I go to /, /login, /register I want to respond with my templated HTML. If the browser asks for another file, such as index.js or something.png I want to serve it from the static folder. I someone wants to access the raw template HTML, such as index.html I want to response with a 404 message.

tera for email templates.

I've been using Tera and Chromium Oxide to generate and render reports to PDF and its been very needs suiting. It can also render to a PNG file.