Top 6 JavaScript Static Site Generator Projects

docsify

9 23,573 8.6 JavaScript

🃏 A magical documentation site generator.

Project mention: Ask HN: Any Sugestions for Proceures Documentation? | news.ycombinator.com | 2023-02-15

The tools to author it aren't that important, frankly. Ask your audience what they're most comfortable using and try to meet them there.
If the stakeholders are technical, you have more options. If they aren't, I hope you like Google Docs or Word, because if you give them anything other than that or a PDF, they'll probably complain. At worst, yeah, write it in a long Markdown text file and use tools like pandoc to transform that into other formats as needed.
If you do need a website and you're not generating enterprise-scale amounts of content (and it sounds like you're not) try things that let you avoid needing build steps and infrastructure if at all possible, so you can iterate and deploy changes with as little friction as you can.
Tools like Docsify[1] can take a pile of Markdown files and serve a site out of them, client- or server-side, without a static build step. Depending on the org, you can get away with GitHub's default rendering of Markdown in a repo. Most static site builds for stuff your scale are overengineered instances of premature optimization.
Past those initial hurdles, the format and tools challenges are all in maintenance. How can you:
- most easily keep the content up to date
- delegate updates as the staff grows or changes
- proactively distribute updates ASAP to the people who'd most benefit from receiving them
That's going to depend a lot more on who'll contribute updates, what their technical proficiency's like, and how they prefer to communicate. It might be a shared git repo and RSS or Slack notifications if they're comfortable with those things, and it might be a Google Doc and email if they're like most non-technical stakeholders.
1: https://docsify.js.org
Metalsmith

3 7,796 3.2 JavaScript

An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator.

Project mention: Top ten popular static site generators (SSG) in 2023 | dev.to | 2023-02-18

Metalsmith — the best customizable SSG
Appwrite

appwrite.io
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Appwrite - The Open Source Firebase alternative introduces iOS support . Appwrite is an open source backend server that helps you build native iOS applications much faster with realtime APIs for authentication, databases, files storage, cloud functions and much more!
Harp

1 4,972 7.4 JavaScript

Static Web Server/Generator/Bundler

Project mention: Is there a technology for reusing HTML components? | reddit.com/r/webdev | 2022-08-14

Sounds like what you want is a static site generator. I've used Harp for a long time but I'm not sure it's really maintained these days, so you might also look at 11ty.
gray-matter

8 3,242 0.0 JavaScript

Smarter YAML front matter parser, used by metalsmith, Gatsby, Netlify, Assemble, mapbox-gl, phenomic, vuejs vitepress, TinaCMS, Shopify Polaris, Ant Design, Astro, hashicorp, garden, slidev, saber, sourcegraph, and many others. Simple to use, and battle tested. Parses YAML by default but can also parse JSON Front Matter, Coffee Front Matter, TOML Front Matter, and has support for custom parsers. Please follow gray-matter's author: https://github.com/jonschlinkert

Project mention: Create an Interactive Table of Contents for a Next.js Blog with Remark | dev.to | 2023-04-21

Although we are building a custom table of contents, we won't have to write everything from scratch. To separate the Markdown/MDX content from the front matter, we'll use the Gray-matter package. It is optional in case you don't have front matter in your Markdown files. To process the Markdown itself, we'll use the Remark package. We'll also need the unist-util-visit package for traversing node trees and mdast-util-to-string for getting the text content of a node.
front-matter

1 625 0.0 JavaScript

Extract YAML front matter from strings

Project mention: Creating an SSG (Static Site Generation) Application with Strapi Webhooks and NextJs | dev.to | 2022-11-16

To set our metadata dynamically, we also imported the front-matter dependency.
Charge

0 410 0.0 JavaScript

⚡️ An opinionated, zero-config static site generator.

NOTE: The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars. The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or since we started tracking (Dec 2020). The latest post mention was on 2023-04-21.