Top Static Site Generators of 2017 | Hacker News Reader

Top Static Site Generators of 2017

netlify.com

67 pointsgk126 comments

Even though Hugo may not have the mindshare that Jekyll does, there's HUGE value in having a tool that's a single binary and works on Linux/osx/win and does not need to have 15 minutes of packages and dependencies .

And it runs blazingly fast.

I help maintain Jus [0], an opinionated static site generator with a focus on simplicity. It has only two commands - jus build compiles your files into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; and jus serve spins up a local development server with live-reloading capabilities. There is no setup required, and jus understands a variety of input formats, including markdown, handlebars templates, sass, ES6 JavaScript with module imports.

One outstanding feature that I frequently use is that jus stores a bunch of metadata about the site in the global handlebars context. This means that things like filenames, data files, and per-page frontmatter are available in every template, making it easy to write dynamic lists or index pages.

[0] http://jus.js.org

FYI: Inspired by TodoMVC and HackerNewsPWA I've started a static site sample showcase [1] - one design, many sites [2]. So far samples include Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Nanoc, Metalsmith, Jigsaw 'n' more. Cheers. [1] http://staystatic.github.io [2] https://github.com/staystatic/staystatic

PS: Add your site! I add a new one every month for June it's all Python with Pelican [3] http://getpelican.com

Strong vote for Hugo. Discovered it via HN a month or two ago, very happy with it. Very responsive dev community both for the core project and for themes.

I also checked out a few dozen and decided on Hugo with the Minos theme. The easiest to use.

I wrote my own because I don't like magic, reading a lot of documentation, and I hate templates. Using server side rendering with React is great! https://github.com/kentor/tiny-ssg

People can also say they don't like javascript and things built on top of that; React. And javascript is probably worse than magic.

Indeed! It also isn't for people who have "javascript fatigue." And they can use any of the 10 in the list by the OP.

I did the same for a blog, except I went with a mak/sed/awk/pandoc combo and got lightning fast incremental builds. Previously I was hexo (listed in the article), it took longer to start than the current solution takes to finish. What made me drop hexo though was the breakages every time I tried to checkout and run on a different computer.

I'm surprised Gatsby came out ahead of Phenomic.io among the ReactJS + JavaScript based static site generators. Having worked with both, Gatsby felt much too opinionated and idiomatic to me, while Phenomic felt much closer to what I would expect a static React site generator to feel like.

I wonder if it has to do with exposure. I see Kyle(the creator) everywhere (conference speaking and twitter to be specific) and it seems like it is the introduction static site generation with React even thought renderToStaticMarkup is built into the ReactDOM library

I wrote my own few years ago because I wanted to have search, comments, RSS etc. https://github.com/Harri/Spage

Dang, any idea why this went from #8 to #70-something in less than a minute?

Probably flagged because it's pretty blog-spammy.

I just use staticjinja, fast enough for my small site and I can use the jinja templates which I learned from a previous job.

Honestly surprised nanoc isn't mentioned, particularly because it seems to be the most flexible framework.

Hugo is my favorite but he really need incremental build

I've been able to get Django to serve pages in less than .2ms (cached), 1-2ms (partially uncached) or about 5ms-10ms (fully uncached) with things like materialized views, streaming HTTP, HTTP/2, and a bunch of other techniques.

Are static pages still a necessity for speed?

I guess you did your benchmark on your localhost ?

Have you tried to do the same benchmark by hosting your app on the east coast (assuming you live on the west coast) ?

For me, google.com takes about 220ms to load.

I guess the question is how much does running a server that is up all the time and hosting a Django project. Static is either free or pennies to post.

And doesn't get hugged to death by HN, unlike the average wordpress installation.

If you can use a static site generator then you also have the capability to spend the minimal time having a pretty good setup like nginx with cached WordPress. In which case both would likely survive HN.

but the static site does not need to be upgraded every WP security alert.

It's nice being able to outsource all of your operations needs to S3 or Surge.sh or Netlify or GitHub or really just about any CDN on the planet.

Static sites can live on S3 which means never worrying about your server crashing (except for that one time!). It's really a stress free way of handling sites :-)

I'm using Next.js 3.0 export command to generate static sites. Hard to beat that in flexibility.

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