Ask HN: What's the simplest static website generator?

1. shite

   1 31 225 3.4 Shell

   The little hot-reloadin' static site maker from shell.

   

   Pandoc can be your friend. My site maker [1] is built around it.

   I think a hundred or so well-chosen lines of your favourite scripting language can do wonders. Mine is ~300 lines of Bash because I over-engineered a thing or two for kicks. The core of it is maybe 50 lines.

   [1] https://github.com/adityaathalye/shite

   The README documents the architecture and rationale. Maybe it will help you figure out yours. Happy hacking!

2. CodeRabbit

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3. piper

   2 5 2 4.9 HTML

   Playground for the Hugo CMS (by cpach)

   

   Hugo without a theme and some simple CSS could do that.

   Feel free to clone this repo: https://github.com/cpach/piper

4. cmark

   3 11 1,717 7.3 C

   CommonMark parsing and rendering library and program in C

   

   I use GNU make. Write content in markdown, feed it to https://github.com/commonmark/cmark to create html. I intended to splice files together using xslt but echo and cat written in the makefile sufficed.

   I'm not totally sure I'd recommend that but I do like the markdown => html flow.

5. mishareyzlin.com

   4 1 3 7.7 JavaScript

   My website built with HTML, CSS and JS

   

   You can iterate over files and collect them into a map from paths to contents and use a 2kb snarkdown if you need markdown parsing. Here’s mine (I use both files and a content.json file for the contents):

   https://github.com/gryzzly/mishareyzlin.com/blob/main/build....

6. gutenberg

   5 119 14,939 9.0 Rust

   A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in. https://www.getzola.org

   

   I think you're thinking about Zola: https://github.com/getzola/zola

   But yes, if I were to recommend something, it'd be Zola given that there's just one executable that you need to run and there's absolutely no setup required.

7. minimum-viable-hugo

   6 12 194 4.4

   No CSS, no JS. One static HTML page to start you off.

   

   Hugo comes out of the box with headers and footers, but you'll probably want to grep around a bit before you understand them fully. I can still recommend my https://github.com/Siilikuin/minimum-viable-hugo as a decent way to get started with a "gears first" approach to Hugo, even though recent developments have made it a bit outdated (in a good way!).

8. astro

   7 584 49,693 10.0 TypeScript

   The web framework for content-driven websites. ⭐️ Star to support our work!

   

   Maybe a bit too elaborate for your taste, but I've used https://astro.build/ and loved every bit of it.

9. SaaSHub

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10. eleventy 🕚⚡️

    8 259 17,774 9.6 JavaScript

    A simpler site generator. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML.

    

    I suggest you to try out eleventhy (https://www.11ty.dev/)

    Quite simple to start, and a nice system to add some scripting and styles without the requirement of bringing in a framework.

11. simplesite

    9 1 1 2.8 Go

    This handles templates (and reloading) and markdown.

    Just call `go run .` when developing, add the `-production` flag when deploying. Note that this is probably more relevant when running on a VPS, as this doesn't produce the HTML files. While simple it is quite powerful as is.

    It can be found here: https://github.com/BenStigsen/simplesite

12. Wintersmith

    10 2 3,494 0.0 CoffeeScript

    A flexible static site generator

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