12 ms·

Static Site Generators

182 points by zx1986 12y ago

lukeholder 12y ago
Wow, big list, I have tried a whole bunch of those but my favourite by far is Hugo using Go. https://github.com/spf13/hugo https://github.com/spf13/hugo I don't know why but using a single binary is awesome!
- im_dario 12y ago
  Yes, single binary is a great feature. All Go-based static generators share this feature (and they are pretty fast).
- danesparza 12y ago
  Single binary + multi platform + awesome documentation = yes please, I'd like some more.
codezero 12y ago
This is slightly off-topic, but are there any rich-text web editors that output to Markdown? I rarely need the full featureset of Markdown and would prefer a simple editor that gets me half way there, while still ultimately outputting Markdown for storage/use in something like a static site generator.
- wlesieutre 12y ago
  http://md-wysiwyg.sourceforge.net/ http://md-wysiwyg.sourceforge.net/ might fit your needs? There's a link to a demo page under the second header. It's a bit primitive, but I guess that's the point. Be sure to hit the "Return markdown text" checkbox.
  - codezero 12y ago
    Cool. I'll check it out, thanks!
  - rhythmvs 12y ago
    The options for wysiwyg Markdown editing are few; they’re listed here.¹ Rich text editing for Markdown, still is an unsolved problem.² ¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/markdown-tools.md#md--html-browser-based-wysiwyg-markdown-editor https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m... ² https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-42942223 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-4294...
wtracy 12y ago
Hey, mine isn't in the list! :-) https://github.com/wtracy/hablog https://github.com/wtracy/hablog That said, it was only ever intended as a toy project, so it probably doesn't belong here.
- kephra 12y ago
  My "Make Here CMS" is also not on the list: http://kephra.de/blog/Make_here_CMS.html http://kephra.de/blog/Make_here_CMS.html http://kephra.de/src/Make-here-CMS-shar.txt http://kephra.de/src/Make-here-CMS-shar.txt The idea is, that a minimal static site generator can be done by a recursive Makefile and a here script.
mskierkowski 12y ago
Something similar: http://staticgen.com/ http://staticgen.com/ Same idea, but staticgen.com is a little easier to navigate but don't think it's quite as comprehensive.
- webXL 12y ago
  Great, now someone's gonna write a static site generator site generator... when does it stop?! There's got to be a list of site/project ideas that people have actually asked for.
- bobfunk 12y ago
  Thanks for the mention - we're working on a new version that'll be open-source and more comprehensive (though still limited to open-source static site generators). Stay tuned :)
  - jaspervdj 12y ago
    I like the additional info on that site! Would you want to consolidate efforts and use: https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/ as an underlying list, too? Maintaining a listing is pretty tedious with all the SSGs out there. I can set up web hooks and whatever to push to your servers if the listing changes.
__david__ 12y ago
Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).
- mikeleeorg 12y ago
  Now that you mention it, building a static site generator would make a great learning exercise for a new programmer. Since they are a fairly common personal project, there are a lot of examples from which to examine.
  - mercer 12y ago
    Indeed! While I learned a lot from Rails' because of how it prescribes a certain structure and approach, the size of it all and the 'magic' that hid a lot of (important) detail was probably suboptimal. Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'. But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with. The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.
- athesyn 12y ago
  I made one last weekend with nodejs and express, at least it's a good exercise for stretching your muscles in a new programming language.
- twic 12y ago
  I wrote one when i was at school, probably 1997 or 1998, to help a friend build a fan site for the Longpigs [1]. I assumed it was long lost, but apparently he took it to university with him, and the web archive caught it: http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri0992/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac... I think all the content was in handwritten HTML, but the generator knew enough to be able to do the navigation links and sitemap and so on. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longpigs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longpigs
antonwinter 12y ago
got my sideproject for you list www.landinggear.me
BenDoan 12y ago
I'm really pleased with FrozenFlask. It lets you develop a normal site with python and flask with all of the flexibility: routing, databases, modules, etc. that you'd expect while still outputing a static website. I made my current blog site with it. https://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/ https://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/ https://github.com/bendoan/bendoan.me https://github.com/bendoan/bendoan.me
- icebraining 12y ago
  Did you need to write any URL generator, or was it able to identify all URLs by itself?
  - BenDoan 12y ago
    You need to write simple flask routes for the different pages, but nothing complicated. Frozen Flask will automatically find all of your pages.
sgdesign 12y ago
Random observations: - Aren't Jekyll and Octopress basically the same thing? - Really impressed at how fast Metalsmith is growing. Might have to give it a try soon. - For now I give my vote to Middleman.
- platz 12y ago
  Any good observations what differences there are between Metalsmith and Assemble?
- Uehreka 12y ago
  Octopress is built on top of Jekyll and is geared towards making blogs to host on Github Pages (they'll run jekyll, but not any plugins, so you need to have a weird deployment setup if you want to use things like Haml and Sass). Jekyll itself is more of the lightweight, no-frills vanilla version.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Octopress runs just fine without github.
imakesnowflakes 12y ago
Here is something I made in php, http://imakesnowflakes.com/vodka-introduction.html http://imakesnowflakes.com/vodka-introduction.html I made it because I found the existing ones unnecessarily complicated, for doing something trivial as converting a bunch of markdown files into html.
ronbeltran 12y ago
It would be more useful if we can filter the list by Stars, License, Language, Created, Updated.
- gdw2 12y ago
  Click on the headings?
  - raving-richard 12y ago
    Enable JavaScript, and then click on the headings I think you mean.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    That's sorting, not filtering.
cwyers 12y ago
I did a doubletake when I was skimming the list and ran across a blogging engine written in Fortran.
srpablo 12y ago
Missing Frog! https://github.com/greghendershott/frog https://github.com/greghendershott/frog Fun little list :D
hpaavola 12y ago
Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page content + some meta data) for management purposes.
- joebadmo 12y ago
  DocPad is a little more involved to get running, but does something like what you're describing: https://github.com/bevry/docpad https://github.com/bevry/docpad
- itafroma 12y ago
  > Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? Both Drupal and Wordpress have modules/plugins that produce static pages: * Drupal: https://drupal.org/project/boost https://drupal.org/project/boost * Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ They're both quite mature and the standard practice for websites that get a lot of anonymous traffic using their respective CMSes. An alternative (or supplement) to them would be something like Varnish: https://www.varnish-cache.org https://www.varnish-cache.org
  - oddevan 12y ago
    There is also a WordPress plugin for generating static pages to upload later, but it's got a lot of gotchas and doesn't seem to have been updated recently. I'm using on my site. http://leonstafford.com/wordpress-static-html-output-plugin/ http://leonstafford.com/wordpress-static-html-output-plugin/
- anu_gupta 12y ago
  Movable Type does this.
slacka 12y ago
My 60 yr old mother runs 2 small nonprofits, and is responsible for the web content and design. She's a pro with Word Perfect, but gets confused by simple HTML tags, and no interest, time, or aptitude to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Last weekend, she asked for help with her website, and I was shocked to find out they still look like they're out of the late 90's. She does all of her editing with a 2006 copy of dreamweaver in WYSIWYG mode. I'm a huge fan of Jekyll, but she is scared by the Liquid/markdown syntax. I was thinking of moving her to Visual Studio for Web or KompoZer. Anyone know a better HTML editor with WYSIWYG mode and modern, beautiful templates or can recommend one of these all 243 generators?
- snide 12y ago
  You might like webhook.com. We're launching in about a month. Basically, we're a static site generator with a CMS. You don't even use YAML or front-matter. Just build your forms with a local GUI, then pass yoursite.com/cms/ over to your Mom so she can edit in a wysiwyg (or markdown...whatever). Design with normal css/html and Django style templating. I built it because I loved static site generators (some great tools in that list), but they were all worthless for me as soon as I needed to pass the site off to non-hacker friends. I wanted it to be easy on me and easy on them. Using firebase and ember, we were able to load the entire CMS off a static server (we still need a server to regenerate on changes though). And before you ask, yes we're trying to figure out how to make it self-hostable. It's a little harder for us, since we use a bunch of separate services (firebase, elastic search, google image resizing...etc) to make it so you don't need to install much locally, just Node. Small team at the moment, trying to avoid VC investment and went straight to Kickstarter. For everyone else who just likes SSGs and don't need a CMS, I'm a big fan of Harp and Cactus. The later because I came from a Django background. If you're looking at a WYSIWYG from a design standpoint you might like something like http://macaw.co/ http://macaw.co/
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Do you think "webhook" might be kind of a confusing name? That's already a thing, and a different thing at that. It sounds to me like a model of automobile called "Motorcycle".
jon_kuperman 12y ago
Awesome list! I've been using jekyll for about 2 years and I really like it. It's crazy that Jekyll is number 1 and 2 considering Octopress runs on it.
colmmacc 12y ago
Your browser as the static site generator; http://composedit.net/ http://composedit.net/ - for when even running the static site generator itself is too much effort!
- Sprint 12y ago
  This creates empty pages to be filled with Javascript.
balladeer 12y ago
I am a Python beginner (being a Java dev day-jobber I've been so for more than a year now) and I badly wanted to have a good static site generator written in Python so that I could learn/practise Python while using it, by tweaking it to my needs. I was surprised to see the lack of support and documentation Python site generators suffer from - even Pelican which is a distant third on the pedestal (of stars in the list). I finally settled with Jekyll as even starting was difficult in one of those Python site generators. So seeing Jekyll having close to 5 times the stars the top Python static site generator has in that list is not surprising.
im_dario 12y ago
(Shameless plug) I maintain Zas, a Go static generator. I checked the other projects in Go and I must say it's funny to see how different are our approaches to the very same thing :) The only big difference that makes Zas stand out is its more Unix-like spirit in how it handles extension through commands as plugins. I'll check the list in the future and try to adquire some more "skills" for Zas.
Navarajan 12y ago
This one is missing "https://sites.zoho.com/" https://sites.zoho.com/"
bpizzi 12y ago
Oh my, thanks for remembering me that I've started a static site generator 3 years ago and never finished it (https://github.com/bpizzi/Hydrastic https://github.com/bpizzi/Hydrastic).
loup-vaillant 12y ago
It lists my generator! Yay! (Note: I use Ultra Simple Site Maker for my own website, but I wouldn't recommend you do at the moment. It's not very flexible right now.)
codecondo 12y ago
I wrote a post on some of these a little while ago, http://codecondo.com/7-static-site-generators-for-building-websites-blogs/ http://codecondo.com/7-static-site-generators-for-building-w... only featured stuff that the majority of developers use.
ezequiel-garzon 12y ago
I've been wondering, with so many static site generators, isn't there one geared toward the "brochureware" market? I'm thinking of something that is very easy to use and maybe imposes rigid assumptions for non-technical people.
- mercer 12y ago
  Could you share more details as to what kind of assumptions you'd expect? I suppose it wouldn't be to hard to use any of the existing static site generators and either 'repackage' them with specific assumptions, or write a module that implements them...
robobro 12y ago
+1 for Blosxom. Does anyone else use it?
Fizzadar 12y ago
Quickly scanned through - pretty sure jinja is a templating engine, not a static site generator...
- jaspervdj 12y ago
  You're right, thanks! https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/commit/610b1b35742a281a84bfb18cf026842d1b92bf67
  - marijn 12y ago
    Also, the link to Heckle is dead. Did you mean my Heckle? https://github.com/marijnh/heckle https://github.com/marijnh/heckle
    - jaspervdj 12y ago
      Not sure, I assume so. I think it was part of a bunch of SSGs imported from another listing. https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/commit/96f23ed30db97067feb42b2f9100ec48c2596eb6
rmc 12y ago
Is there any static site generators for photos? Something like "host your own flickr"? Something that uses exif tags, directory hierarchy, etc to make a static browsable list of your photos?
- Matrixik 12y ago
  There aren't many tools like that. Personally I like and use `lazygal`: http://sousmonlit.zincube.net/~niol/playa/oss/projects/lazygal/ http://sousmonlit.zincube.net/~niol/playa/oss/projects/lazyg... Source: https://bitbucket.org/niol/lazygal https://bitbucket.org/niol/lazygal It's live and maintained. I also contributed some code fixes and theme to it.
- hpaavola 12y ago
  Jalbum http://jalbum.net/en/software/features http://jalbum.net/en/software/features It's been about 10 years since I last used it, but looks like it's still basically the same thing; reads your photos directory, creates html pages with thumbnails and links to bigger pictures based on the directory structure. Can display EXIF data next to the images if you want.
- raving-richard 12y ago
  Build your own. I've written something like that. It's not static, because I don't want to have to rebuild everything just 'cause I added a new photo, or fix a type. However, you do literately just use the file system to add and manage photos. I won't link to it because I don't want to link to my real ID. But it's pretty simple. You just have to recursively go over the folder, and get each photo. Make sure there is a thumbnail, and build your HTML.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    It's not static, because I don't want to have to rebuild everything just 'cause I added a new photo, or fix a type. Some generators (e.g. gostatic) can track changes and dependencies, rebuilding just what changed.
  - rmc 12y ago
jannes 12y ago
I use gulp with gulp-nunjucks-render as my static-site generator. It offers the most flexibility to me and in the end any static-site generator is just rendering templates.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tsifei 12y ago
Check out Pikock: http://www.pikock.com/ http://www.pikock.com/ It's a static site generator all made with Ruby on Rails and AngularJS for the front.
fractalsea 12y ago
I didn't see Hakyll [1] on the list. It is a minimal static site generator written in Haskell. I have just set it up for my first personal site [2]. It is my first experience using a static site generator, and so far I can highly recommend giving it a go. [1] http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ [2] http://willsewell.name http://willsewell.name
- stevekemp 12y ago
  When I was reviewing existing static site generators I couldn't make Hakyll install - but this was back under Squeeze (Debian). https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators
  - fractalsea 12y ago
    Did you try and install the package "haskell-platform"? That's probably the easiest way to get Haskell up and running. Then it's a simple matter of using cable to install other libraries, including Hakyll.
    - stevekemp 12y ago
      My memory is hazy, so I cannot say for sure. The fact that I didn't document that as a requirement suggests that either I didn't know it was, or that I did, but it didn't help. Either way I will revisit this now there is a new Debian stable, and I can install the package natively without using cabal.
davexunit 12y ago
I've been using Pelican as my static site generator of choice, but I'm frustrated that Markdown and ReStructured Text are the only formats it can handle. I chose ReStructured Text over Markdown, but what I really want is to write org files. I've been meaning to roll my own solution in Emacs Lisp using org-publish plus some custom functions to generate RSS feeds, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.
- davexunit 12y ago
  I found a cool project called org-page that looks pretty good. https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page I have some concerns about its architecture in that it's too integrated with git repositories, but it looks like a great place to start from.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  IIRC Pelican also works w/asciidoc.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  It would probably be pretty straightforward to just write an org adapter as a Pelican reader plugin: http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins.html#how-to-create-a-new-reader http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins.html#how-to...
gadders 12y ago
No City Desk from Fog Creek?[1] :-) https://shop.fogcreek.com/default.asp?sCategory=CITYDESKINDEX https://shop.fogcreek.com/default.asp?sCategory=CITYDESKINDE...
- gadders 12y ago
  I'm being semi-facetious, but when it first started out it did all this stuff and deployed it to your website as well via FTP.
jacquesm 12y ago
I've been using Octopress for a while now. It's super nice except for one major gripe which is that as the number of posts grows it slows down to a crawl. Other than that I'm totally happy, but a 5 minute wait to fix a typo gets old quickly.
skywhopper 12y ago
Apparently the site about Static Site Generators is experiencing application problems and is unable to serve content at the moment. Should I be amused or enraged?
- oddevan 12y ago
  This feels like irony. Is this irony?
  - bradleyland 12y ago
    It would be a better case of irony if the site were using a static site generator instead of a web app. That sounds a little unlikely though: "Site about statis site generators taken down by static site generator scaling issues."
    - balupton 12y ago
      The site uses DocPad, a static site generator. The downtime was caused by the YAML file having invalid syntax so it would not parse. Whenever a modification to the YAML file is made, a github post hook is sent to the server telling it to regenerate the website. Normally this happens smoothly without anyone noticing any downtime, while maintaing awesome performance. In this case because of the bad YAML, DocPad crashed, as it was told to, and the logs showed the error. I was sleeping at the time so did not notice the issue. The latest version of the website now handles this gracefully, using the latest successful data if the YAML is bad, as well as showing an error message.
- sklivvz1971 12y ago
  oh the irony...
ChrisArchitect 12y ago
another one of these resource lists sites eh (do we have a general list/information curating problem?) Normally I would be in this posting http://modernstatic.com/ http://modernstatic.com/ as a long standing index of static generators but hm..seems to have been neglected/let expire..and I can't remember who created it. http://staticgen.com http://staticgen.com is a decent alternative
joshcrews 12y ago
I'm a Ruby developer and interested in creating a business in this space. Specifically a online-CMS that generates static html uploaded to a CDN. The target market is businesses who need to know their content is "uncrashable" and "infinitely scalable". The price point would be >$100/mo. Get in touch with me if you are interested in that idea.
- ixmatus 12y ago
  That sounds like a feature not a product.
  - ixmatus 12y ago
    Lol at the downvoters. I'm sure you can build a lifestyle business around a CMS that spits out a static site but honestly, unless your audience is Hacker News, people don't care whether it's static or dynamic and often times they'll ask for that one thing that isn't static and breaks your ability to sell to them. So yes, this is a feature and not a product as evinced by the numerous plugins and projects that take existing dynamic web application software and can produce static sites (Flask Freeze, Drupal's plugin, I think even WordPress has one). [EDIT] Which means, what's to stop the existing "site builder" companies from doing the same? They don't sell the feature (static builder from a dynamic site), they sell the product (build yourself a site), and people buy it. The "background benefit" is a slightly faster site and who does that really matter to? Not the customer. The service - reduction of bandwidth and server resources; the could easily introduce the feature, cut resources, and keep the margin.
- programminggeek 12y ago
  I have a similar idea and your pricing is on track. Most people seem to price according to cost and think they're clever charing $9/mo. for hosting. The technical side is not particularly difficult aside from dealing syncing and maybe failover. What is trickier is probably the CMS side because building a CMS is like the definition of feature creep. Eventually people want/get every feature under the sun, even if that doesn't really scale. You probably have an interesting business there, but managing customer expectations and finding the happy balance in terms of investment is tricky. Also, the customer acquisition side of the business is somewhat tough, but worth solving. Good luck!
pessimizer 12y ago
sitedown: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fstaticsitegenerators.net%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
xrd 12y ago
If you are interested in a site which creates a Jekyll blog, and installs it on GitHub for you, and has an Android app that acts as the correlate to the Wordpress app (and is open source) then check out http://teddyhyde.com http://teddyhyde.com. http://blog.teddyhyde.com http://blog.teddyhyde.com documents how to modify the Android app if you want to help hack it.
tracker1 12y ago
google cache... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fOkco3VsTvgJ:staticsitegenerators.net/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fOkco3V...
t3ra 12y ago
Isnt PICO (picocms.org) a good fit for this list ?

182 points by zx1986 12y ago

Wow, big list, I have tried a whole bunch of those but my favourite by far is Hugo using Go. https://github.com/spf13/hugo https://github.com/spf13/hugo I don't know why but using a single binary is awesome!

im_dario 12y ago
Yes, single binary is a great feature. All Go-based static generators share this feature (and they are pretty fast).
danesparza 12y ago
Single binary + multi platform + awesome documentation = yes please, I'd like some more.

codezero 12y ago

This is slightly off-topic, but are there any rich-text web editors that output to Markdown? I rarely need the full featureset of Markdown and would prefer a simple editor that gets me half way there, while still ultimately outputting Markdown for storage/use in something like a static site generator.

wlesieutre 12y ago
http://md-wysiwyg.sourceforge.net/ http://md-wysiwyg.sourceforge.net/ might fit your needs? There's a link to a demo page under the second header. It's a bit primitive, but I guess that's the point. Be sure to hit the "Return markdown text" checkbox.
- codezero 12y ago
  Cool. I'll check it out, thanks!
- rhythmvs 12y ago
  The options for wysiwyg Markdown editing are few; they’re listed here.¹ Rich text editing for Markdown, still is an unsolved problem.² ¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/markdown-tools.md#md--html-browser-based-wysiwyg-markdown-editor https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m... ² https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-42942223 https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-4294...

wtracy 12y ago

Hey, mine isn't in the list! :-) https://github.com/wtracy/hablog https://github.com/wtracy/hablog That said, it was only ever intended as a toy project, so it probably doesn't belong here.

kephra 12y ago
My "Make Here CMS" is also not on the list: http://kephra.de/blog/Make_here_CMS.html http://kephra.de/blog/Make_here_CMS.html http://kephra.de/src/Make-here-CMS-shar.txt http://kephra.de/src/Make-here-CMS-shar.txt The idea is, that a minimal static site generator can be done by a recursive Makefile and a here script.

mskierkowski 12y ago

Something similar: http://staticgen.com/ http://staticgen.com/ Same idea, but staticgen.com is a little easier to navigate but don't think it's quite as comprehensive.

webXL 12y ago
Great, now someone's gonna write a static site generator site generator... when does it stop?! There's got to be a list of site/project ideas that people have actually asked for.
bobfunk 12y ago
Thanks for the mention - we're working on a new version that'll be open-source and more comprehensive (though still limited to open-source static site generators). Stay tuned :)
- jaspervdj 12y ago
  I like the additional info on that site! Would you want to consolidate efforts and use: https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/ as an underlying list, too? Maintaining a listing is pretty tedious with all the SSGs out there. I can set up web hooks and whatever to push to your servers if the listing changes.

__david__ 12y ago

Static site generators seem like music databases, in that everyone eventually writes their own crappy one that just barely scratches the itch they had (and I'm no exception).

mikeleeorg 12y ago
Now that you mention it, building a static site generator would make a great learning exercise for a new programmer. Since they are a fairly common personal project, there are a lot of examples from which to examine.
- mercer 12y ago
  Indeed! While I learned a lot from Rails' because of how it prescribes a certain structure and approach, the size of it all and the 'magic' that hid a lot of (important) detail was probably suboptimal. Now I'd been building websites for a while, so I'd already gone organically through the whole 'hey let's use php to cut my pages up into reusable modules', 'I can automate this thing here', 'plugins are awesome!', and 'hey what's this MVC thing'. But for people starting from less, a static site generator might be more explicit and less complex to learn with. The mere fact that there's often a 'build' step that converts your stuff to plain html, javascript and css, I find, makes beginners feel like they understand things a little better.
athesyn 12y ago
I made one last weekend with nodejs and express, at least it's a good exercise for stretching your muscles in a new programming language.
twic 12y ago
I wrote one when i was at school, probably 1997 or 1998, to help a friend build a fan site for the Longpigs [1]. I assumed it was long lost, but apparently he took it to university with him, and the web archive caught it: http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac.uk/~chri0992/ http://web.archive.org/web/20010519223318/http://users.ox.ac... I think all the content was in handwritten HTML, but the generator knew enough to be able to do the navigation links and sitemap and so on. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longpigs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longpigs

antonwinter 12y ago

got my sideproject for you list www.landinggear.me

BenDoan 12y ago

I'm really pleased with FrozenFlask. It lets you develop a normal site with python and flask with all of the flexibility: routing, databases, modules, etc. that you'd expect while still outputing a static website. I made my current blog site with it. https://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/ https://pythonhosted.org/Frozen-Flask/ https://github.com/bendoan/bendoan.me https://github.com/bendoan/bendoan.me

icebraining 12y ago
Did you need to write any URL generator, or was it able to identify all URLs by itself?
- BenDoan 12y ago
  You need to write simple flask routes for the different pages, but nothing complicated. Frozen Flask will automatically find all of your pages.

sgdesign 12y ago

Random observations: - Aren't Jekyll and Octopress basically the same thing? - Really impressed at how fast Metalsmith is growing. Might have to give it a try soon. - For now I give my vote to Middleman.

platz 12y ago
Any good observations what differences there are between Metalsmith and Assemble?
Uehreka 12y ago
Octopress is built on top of Jekyll and is geared towards making blogs to host on Github Pages (they'll run jekyll, but not any plugins, so you need to have a weird deployment setup if you want to use things like Haml and Sass). Jekyll itself is more of the lightweight, no-frills vanilla version.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Octopress runs just fine without github.

imakesnowflakes 12y ago

Here is something I made in php, http://imakesnowflakes.com/vodka-introduction.html http://imakesnowflakes.com/vodka-introduction.html I made it because I found the existing ones unnecessarily complicated, for doing something trivial as converting a bunch of markdown files into html.

ronbeltran 12y ago

It would be more useful if we can filter the list by Stars, License, Language, Created, Updated.

gdw2 12y ago
Click on the headings?
- raving-richard 12y ago
  Enable JavaScript, and then click on the headings I think you mean.
- icebraining 12y ago
  That's sorting, not filtering.

cwyers 12y ago

I did a doubletake when I was skimming the list and ran across a blogging engine written in Fortran.

srpablo 12y ago

Missing Frog! https://github.com/greghendershott/frog https://github.com/greghendershott/frog Fun little list :D

hpaavola 12y ago

Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? That way search and comments (and especially moderation for comments) would be easier to handle, but still it would be easy on the server. For my own site I created something like this, https://github.com/Harri/Spage https://github.com/Harri/Spage , but instead of DB, I used another set of flat files (serialized arrays containing the page content + some meta data) for management purposes.

joebadmo 12y ago
DocPad is a little more involved to get running, but does something like what you're describing: https://github.com/bevry/docpad https://github.com/bevry/docpad
itafroma 12y ago
> Is ther any CMS/blog/... type of thing that would create flat files, but keep all the content also in DB? Both Drupal and Wordpress have modules/plugins that produce static pages: * Drupal: https://drupal.org/project/boost https://drupal.org/project/boost * Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-super-cache/ They're both quite mature and the standard practice for websites that get a lot of anonymous traffic using their respective CMSes. An alternative (or supplement) to them would be something like Varnish: https://www.varnish-cache.org https://www.varnish-cache.org
- oddevan 12y ago
  There is also a WordPress plugin for generating static pages to upload later, but it's got a lot of gotchas and doesn't seem to have been updated recently. I'm using on my site. http://leonstafford.com/wordpress-static-html-output-plugin/ http://leonstafford.com/wordpress-static-html-output-plugin/
anu_gupta 12y ago
Movable Type does this.

slacka 12y ago

My 60 yr old mother runs 2 small nonprofits, and is responsible for the web content and design. She's a pro with Word Perfect, but gets confused by simple HTML tags, and no interest, time, or aptitude to learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Last weekend, she asked for help with her website, and I was shocked to find out they still look like they're out of the late 90's. She does all of her editing with a 2006 copy of dreamweaver in WYSIWYG mode. I'm a huge fan of Jekyll, but she is scared by the Liquid/markdown syntax. I was thinking of moving her to Visual Studio for Web or KompoZer. Anyone know a better HTML editor with WYSIWYG mode and modern, beautiful templates or can recommend one of these all 243 generators?

snide 12y ago
You might like webhook.com. We're launching in about a month. Basically, we're a static site generator with a CMS. You don't even use YAML or front-matter. Just build your forms with a local GUI, then pass yoursite.com/cms/ over to your Mom so she can edit in a wysiwyg (or markdown...whatever). Design with normal css/html and Django style templating. I built it because I loved static site generators (some great tools in that list), but they were all worthless for me as soon as I needed to pass the site off to non-hacker friends. I wanted it to be easy on me and easy on them. Using firebase and ember, we were able to load the entire CMS off a static server (we still need a server to regenerate on changes though). And before you ask, yes we're trying to figure out how to make it self-hostable. It's a little harder for us, since we use a bunch of separate services (firebase, elastic search, google image resizing...etc) to make it so you don't need to install much locally, just Node. Small team at the moment, trying to avoid VC investment and went straight to Kickstarter. For everyone else who just likes SSGs and don't need a CMS, I'm a big fan of Harp and Cactus. The later because I came from a Django background. If you're looking at a WYSIWYG from a design standpoint you might like something like http://macaw.co/ http://macaw.co/
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Do you think "webhook" might be kind of a confusing name? That's already a thing, and a different thing at that. It sounds to me like a model of automobile called "Motorcycle".

jon_kuperman 12y ago

Awesome list! I've been using jekyll for about 2 years and I really like it. It's crazy that Jekyll is number 1 and 2 considering Octopress runs on it.

colmmacc 12y ago

Your browser as the static site generator; http://composedit.net/ http://composedit.net/ - for when even running the static site generator itself is too much effort!

Sprint 12y ago
This creates empty pages to be filled with Javascript.

balladeer 12y ago

I am a Python beginner (being a Java dev day-jobber I've been so for more than a year now) and I badly wanted to have a good static site generator written in Python so that I could learn/practise Python while using it, by tweaking it to my needs. I was surprised to see the lack of support and documentation Python site generators suffer from - even Pelican which is a distant third on the pedestal (of stars in the list). I finally settled with Jekyll as even starting was difficult in one of those Python site generators. So seeing Jekyll having close to 5 times the stars the top Python static site generator has in that list is not surprising.

im_dario 12y ago

(Shameless plug) I maintain Zas, a Go static generator. I checked the other projects in Go and I must say it's funny to see how different are our approaches to the very same thing :) The only big difference that makes Zas stand out is its more Unix-like spirit in how it handles extension through commands as plugins. I'll check the list in the future and try to adquire some more "skills" for Zas.

Navarajan 12y ago

This one is missing "https://sites.zoho.com/" https://sites.zoho.com/"

bpizzi 12y ago

Oh my, thanks for remembering me that I've started a static site generator 3 years ago and never finished it (https://github.com/bpizzi/Hydrastic https://github.com/bpizzi/Hydrastic).

loup-vaillant 12y ago

It lists my generator! Yay! (Note: I use Ultra Simple Site Maker for my own website, but I wouldn't recommend you do at the moment. It's not very flexible right now.)

codecondo 12y ago

I wrote a post on some of these a little while ago, http://codecondo.com/7-static-site-generators-for-building-websites-blogs/ http://codecondo.com/7-static-site-generators-for-building-w... only featured stuff that the majority of developers use.

ezequiel-garzon 12y ago

I've been wondering, with so many static site generators, isn't there one geared toward the "brochureware" market? I'm thinking of something that is very easy to use and maybe imposes rigid assumptions for non-technical people.

mercer 12y ago
Could you share more details as to what kind of assumptions you'd expect? I suppose it wouldn't be to hard to use any of the existing static site generators and either 'repackage' them with specific assumptions, or write a module that implements them...

robobro 12y ago

+1 for Blosxom. Does anyone else use it?

Fizzadar 12y ago

Quickly scanned through - pretty sure jinja is a templating engine, not a static site generator...

jaspervdj 12y ago
You're right, thanks! https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/commit/610b1b35742a281a84bfb18cf026842d1b92bf67
- marijn 12y ago
  Also, the link to Heckle is dead. Did you mean my Heckle? https://github.com/marijnh/heckle https://github.com/marijnh/heckle
  - jaspervdj 12y ago
    Not sure, I assume so. I think it was part of a bunch of SSGs imported from another listing. https://github.com/jaspervdj/static-site-generator-comparison/commit/96f23ed30db97067feb42b2f9100ec48c2596eb6

rmc 12y ago

Is there any static site generators for photos? Something like "host your own flickr"? Something that uses exif tags, directory hierarchy, etc to make a static browsable list of your photos?

Matrixik 12y ago
There aren't many tools like that. Personally I like and use `lazygal`: http://sousmonlit.zincube.net/~niol/playa/oss/projects/lazygal/ http://sousmonlit.zincube.net/~niol/playa/oss/projects/lazyg... Source: https://bitbucket.org/niol/lazygal https://bitbucket.org/niol/lazygal It's live and maintained. I also contributed some code fixes and theme to it.
hpaavola 12y ago
Jalbum http://jalbum.net/en/software/features http://jalbum.net/en/software/features It's been about 10 years since I last used it, but looks like it's still basically the same thing; reads your photos directory, creates html pages with thumbnails and links to bigger pictures based on the directory structure. Can display EXIF data next to the images if you want.
raving-richard 12y ago
Build your own. I've written something like that. It's not static, because I don't want to have to rebuild everything just 'cause I added a new photo, or fix a type. However, you do literately just use the file system to add and manage photos. I won't link to it because I don't want to link to my real ID. But it's pretty simple. You just have to recursively go over the folder, and get each photo. Make sure there is a thumbnail, and build your HTML.
- icebraining 12y ago
  It's not static, because I don't want to have to rebuild everything just 'cause I added a new photo, or fix a type. Some generators (e.g. gostatic) can track changes and dependencies, rebuilding just what changed.
- rmc 12y ago

jannes 12y ago

I use gulp with gulp-nunjucks-render as my static-site generator. It offers the most flexibility to me and in the end any static-site generator is just rendering templates.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

tsifei 12y ago

Check out Pikock: http://www.pikock.com/ http://www.pikock.com/ It's a static site generator all made with Ruby on Rails and AngularJS for the front.

fractalsea 12y ago

I didn't see Hakyll [1] on the list. It is a minimal static site generator written in Haskell. I have just set it up for my first personal site [2]. It is my first experience using a static site generator, and so far I can highly recommend giving it a go. [1] http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ http://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/ [2] http://willsewell.name http://willsewell.name

stevekemp 12y ago
When I was reviewing existing static site generators I couldn't make Hakyll install - but this was back under Squeeze (Debian). https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators https://github.com/skx/static-site-generators
- fractalsea 12y ago
  Did you try and install the package "haskell-platform"? That's probably the easiest way to get Haskell up and running. Then it's a simple matter of using cable to install other libraries, including Hakyll.
  - stevekemp 12y ago
    My memory is hazy, so I cannot say for sure. The fact that I didn't document that as a requirement suggests that either I didn't know it was, or that I did, but it didn't help. Either way I will revisit this now there is a new Debian stable, and I can install the package natively without using cabal.

davexunit 12y ago

I've been using Pelican as my static site generator of choice, but I'm frustrated that Markdown and ReStructured Text are the only formats it can handle. I chose ReStructured Text over Markdown, but what I really want is to write org files. I've been meaning to roll my own solution in Emacs Lisp using org-publish plus some custom functions to generate RSS feeds, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

davexunit 12y ago
I found a cool project called org-page that looks pretty good. https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page https://github.com/kelvinh/org-page I have some concerns about its architecture in that it's too integrated with git repositories, but it looks like a great place to start from.
pessimizer 12y ago
IIRC Pelican also works w/asciidoc.
jessaustin 12y ago
It would probably be pretty straightforward to just write an org adapter as a Pelican reader plugin: http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins.html#how-to-create-a-new-reader http://pelican.readthedocs.org/en/latest/plugins.html#how-to...

gadders 12y ago

No City Desk from Fog Creek?[1] :-) https://shop.fogcreek.com/default.asp?sCategory=CITYDESKINDEX https://shop.fogcreek.com/default.asp?sCategory=CITYDESKINDE...

gadders 12y ago
I'm being semi-facetious, but when it first started out it did all this stuff and deployed it to your website as well via FTP.

jacquesm 12y ago

I've been using Octopress for a while now. It's super nice except for one major gripe which is that as the number of posts grows it slows down to a crawl. Other than that I'm totally happy, but a 5 minute wait to fix a typo gets old quickly.

skywhopper 12y ago

Apparently the site about Static Site Generators is experiencing application problems and is unable to serve content at the moment. Should I be amused or enraged?

oddevan 12y ago
This feels like irony. Is this irony?
- bradleyland 12y ago
  It would be a better case of irony if the site were using a static site generator instead of a web app. That sounds a little unlikely though: "Site about statis site generators taken down by static site generator scaling issues."
  - balupton 12y ago
    The site uses DocPad, a static site generator. The downtime was caused by the YAML file having invalid syntax so it would not parse. Whenever a modification to the YAML file is made, a github post hook is sent to the server telling it to regenerate the website. Normally this happens smoothly without anyone noticing any downtime, while maintaing awesome performance. In this case because of the bad YAML, DocPad crashed, as it was told to, and the logs showed the error. I was sleeping at the time so did not notice the issue. The latest version of the website now handles this gracefully, using the latest successful data if the YAML is bad, as well as showing an error message.
sklivvz1971 12y ago
oh the irony...

ChrisArchitect 12y ago

another one of these resource lists sites eh (do we have a general list/information curating problem?) Normally I would be in this posting http://modernstatic.com/ http://modernstatic.com/ as a long standing index of static generators but hm..seems to have been neglected/let expire..and I can't remember who created it. http://staticgen.com http://staticgen.com is a decent alternative

joshcrews 12y ago

I'm a Ruby developer and interested in creating a business in this space. Specifically a online-CMS that generates static html uploaded to a CDN. The target market is businesses who need to know their content is "uncrashable" and "infinitely scalable". The price point would be >$100/mo. Get in touch with me if you are interested in that idea.

ixmatus 12y ago
That sounds like a feature not a product.
- ixmatus 12y ago
  Lol at the downvoters. I'm sure you can build a lifestyle business around a CMS that spits out a static site but honestly, unless your audience is Hacker News, people don't care whether it's static or dynamic and often times they'll ask for that one thing that isn't static and breaks your ability to sell to them. So yes, this is a feature and not a product as evinced by the numerous plugins and projects that take existing dynamic web application software and can produce static sites (Flask Freeze, Drupal's plugin, I think even WordPress has one). [EDIT] Which means, what's to stop the existing "site builder" companies from doing the same? They don't sell the feature (static builder from a dynamic site), they sell the product (build yourself a site), and people buy it. The "background benefit" is a slightly faster site and who does that really matter to? Not the customer. The service - reduction of bandwidth and server resources; the could easily introduce the feature, cut resources, and keep the margin.
programminggeek 12y ago
I have a similar idea and your pricing is on track. Most people seem to price according to cost and think they're clever charing $9/mo. for hosting. The technical side is not particularly difficult aside from dealing syncing and maybe failover. What is trickier is probably the CMS side because building a CMS is like the definition of feature creep. Eventually people want/get every feature under the sun, even if that doesn't really scale. You probably have an interesting business there, but managing customer expectations and finding the happy balance in terms of investment is tricky. Also, the customer acquisition side of the business is somewhat tough, but worth solving. Good luck!

pessimizer 12y ago

sitedown: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fstaticsitegenerators.net%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...

xrd 12y ago

If you are interested in a site which creates a Jekyll blog, and installs it on GitHub for you, and has an Android app that acts as the correlate to the Wordpress app (and is open source) then check out http://teddyhyde.com http://teddyhyde.com. http://blog.teddyhyde.com http://blog.teddyhyde.com documents how to modify the Android app if you want to help hack it.

tracker1 12y ago

google cache... http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fOkco3VsTvgJ:staticsitegenerators.net/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fOkco3V...

t3ra 12y ago

Isnt PICO (picocms.org) a good fit for this list ?