Ask HN: Best static site generator for a docs site in 2026? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best static site generator for a docs site in 2026?

I'm looking for recommendations for a static site generator to rebuild our documentation site in 2026.

1. Markdown support 2. Fast build (<60s) 3. Search without JS 4. Deploy on GitHub Pages

Budget: $0

I use and recommend Lume [1] for static site generation, and I know it has a couple of search plugins, but I haven't used them. As others have mentioned, your search without JS requirement will be hard to implement, unless you use an external provider for the indexing and search.

[1] https://lume.land

I use Hugo Book[1] for the documentation of FormBeep[2]

It's been super easy and I host it free on CF pages:

[1]https://hugo-book-demo.netlify.app/docs/example/ [2]https://docs.formbeep.com

How are you expecting search to work without JS? I'm pretty sure you would need either some sort of backend OR JS for any sort of search to work.

Or maybe another option would be to outsource the search part to "site:yourdomain" on google or something similar.

https://starlight.astro.build/

The whole site can be configured in the astro.config.js file and the rest is markdown.

If you want an example you can look at sst.dev and their github repo at https://github.com/anomalyco/sst/tree/dev/www

I’m using middleman for ages and been pretty happy with it. It’s a ruby-based static side generator framework.

I have no idea about speed. Markdown support sure, I use HAML as well. There are search plugins but you can use any a publicly available search engine (Google, DuckDuckGo, etc) for that if you want to avoid JS or backend DBs.

I have used this one : https://deepsite.hf.co/

It generates static pages using only HTML and CSS, which makes it blazing fast. It can also handle jQuery and JavaScript very smoothly.

"Search without JS" and "static site generation" doesn't make much sense. Without client-side search, you'll need a search product or back-end search functionality? (both of which are not "static")

There are some static sites that provide simple searches, but they require javascript.

https://zensical.org/ I have no idea how the search works though!

https://www.11ty.dev/ ?

You could use something like mintlify to do this. Im on their free plan and it gets the job done

Nikola https://getnikola.com

Gitbook gets the job done

Reply on news.ycombinator.com