Ask HN: What's a good static site generator to use for a blog in 2018?

This is likely to be an unpopular answer, but the best choice is probably WordPress. I just used it to generate a network of about 40 static sites because (1) it has literally thousands of beautiful, professionally-developed themes for free; (2) same goes for plugins; (3) it's easy to hack if need be; and (4) it probably has one of the easiest-to-use and most-complete content editors, capable of creating both pages and blog entries, upload media, cropping images, etc.; (5) it has a variety of static site generation plugins to choose from; and (6) I spent hours looking at hugo, pelican, etc. and realized that any minor qualm I had with any of these common solutions was more or less addressed by the large and robust community of WordPress developers and enthusiasts.

It's not a sexy answer, but it's practical. Just make sure you don't leave the WordPress site you use to generate static content open to the public.

What is all the recent trend for static site generators about ? What happened non-static sites ?

Hugo is, IMHO, one of the best, most versatile options out there for an SSG. I've been using it since v0.15 (now at 0.37).

I use it for a simple, mostly text, blog (https://kar.ai).

I also use it for an image-heavy company site (https://www.stonelandinc.com).

I also use it for 20+ other sites for clients.

It's undergoing heavy development, so that may be a pro or con, depending.

e.g. Recently they added image processing [0]. This eliminates a python script I was using for the same purpose. It's much faster as well, which matters when regenerating ~1k images.

Down side, documentation & community is still catching up on the newer features.

0: https://gohugo.io/content-management/image-processing/

The best choices currently I think are:

-- Ghost (expensive but dead simple to apply themes) or

-- Hugo + Netflify (for hosting and automatically publishing your site when you push to your repo) + Forestry.io (for a nice front end to edit your posts if you want to avoid the command line)

I care about Markdown plus MathJax support (for math notation) and both these options support that.

* Makefile * Pandoc * git

You push to a remote on your server, it runs the Makefile via post-receive hook and builds a single, static html file from your Markdown with Pandoc (inlineing everything, images even fonts if you want to) and copies it to the folder served by your nginx.

I'm very happy with using pelican for my blog:

https://startuplab.io/blog

It's very flexible, written in python, easy to customize, has plugins for any purpose. It supports markdown, latex, code snippets (with syntax highlighting). It's very simple to set up and you can use it for any purpose.

I've made a custom theme, configured it a bit, and served it with nginx on digital ocean(but you could also host it for free on github pages).

You can see the code and my custom theme here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab

----

Here's a few simple things I want to recommend, based on my experience:

- Immediately setup a mailchimp account and an RSS feed. Add a link in the header, and under each post (you can see how it works on my blog), you want to start build a list of followers right away.

- Ideally, write a short ebook or a guide to give people extra incentive to subscribe. The sooner you do this - the better. Here's a sexy landing page I've made for my blog to use as an example:

https://startuplab.io/free-guide

- Keep the design elegant and simple, nobody needs distracting sidebars or popups, avoid them unless absolutely necessary.

- Underneath my posts, I have 3 boxes recommending my other articles (or promoting my projects), it's a really neat way to keep people on your site.

- Don't forget to set up metadata and social images for good SEO and sharing. You can see how I did it in my template here:

https://github.com/raymestalez/startuplab/blob/master/themes...

- For a very simple commenting system I highly recommend isso:

https://posativ.org/isso/

It's really easy to setup and a pleasure to use. Although personally, I share my posts on HN/reddit, and have a link to the discussion thread automatically embedded in the post footer. That way you don't need any complex setup, and it's better for the exposure.

I'm using Hakyll, simply because I want a bit more exposure to Haskell. I've used Jekyll and Hugo in the past. Jekyll has lots of support but is slow for large sites. Hugo was alright. Only used it for a small project.

Like many others said, Hugo (https://gohugo.io) is super-awesome.

- Single static binary for any platform for a static site generator; couldn't get better. - The fastest too! - The Go templating is great! It should be fairly easy to pick up by anyone knowing any programming language. I love it especially because it reminds me of Lisp. Example: {{ or (and $a $b) $c }}. (For the folks that are not a fan of Lisp, you can right the same as {{ and $a $b | or $c }}.)

Hugo has inbuilt support for Org mode. But I use more Org syntax than the inbuilt version can support. So I came up with an Emacs package that's an Org exporter backend that exports to Hugo/Blackfriday Markdown + front-matter -- ox-hugo. Folks appreciative of Emacs Org mode might want to check out the homepage https://ox-hugo.scripter.co/ "dog-fooded" by the package itself :)

IMO, just about any will do, but the simplest thing that'll get the job done is probably the best choice - less inertia.

If all you need is a markdown-powered blog, then choose something that does only that. I use Gatsby because I'm familiar with React and it does what I need it to do.

I provide a few small businesses with simple websites to advertise their services (opening times and the like) where wordpress would have been the "traditional" choice, and the main thing I've learned from this is to stay away from loads of plugins or extra functionality until you absolutely need it - it's just more maintenance overhead and things to mess about with/configure. When I update a client site, I simply edit some text and regenerate the site - no plugins to update or config files to edit.

Hugo seems quite popular these days, especially if you like Go https://github.com/gohugoio/hugo

Not sure if `blogdown` is known among wider audience. `blogdown` is an R package to generate static websites based on R Markdown and Hugo. So it couples the ease of using R markdown and speed/simplicity of HuGO. https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown But I'm not sure if a non-programmer would be interested in this just for blogging.

Hugo is good, but you will need some technical expertise to customize it, unless you use a stock theme/template.

GitHub pages is also a great way to get started quickly - Markdown is easy to learn and there are several cheat sheets out there.

What I did in the end is created my own very simple site generator (calling it that is probably being over generous) - it lacks many features of a full-blown generator like Hugo, but it suits me down to the ground. I then host (for free) on GitHub and publish also to neocities.org (for free). See my HN profile for link to website - from there you can pick up the source code if you're interested.

Good luck with your blogging!

Hugo is pretty good. I've started using it for some project websites[1,2], though I don't use it for blogging. For my own website/blog, I wrote it from scratch using Flask[3].

[1]: https://rootlesscontaine.rs/ [2]: https://umo.ci/ [3]: https://www.cyphar.com/

I use Hugo too for https://apporchestra.com I have it in a GitLab repository with the continuous integration script configured to build and deploy it to Google app engine (configured as a static content so no paid instances are running) each time I push a commit.

- Hugo

- Travis CI

- Cloudflare

- GitHub Pages

This is how I host my website completely for free with SSL. Whenever I commit it to GitHub it will build and deploy it for me.

I use Hugo [0] as a static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterward you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean (starting with 5€ a month which scales well) [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] https://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

What counts as "good enough" is such a subjective thing. What works for you will be some function of your needs and technical proficiency. It seems as though you don't have any specific needs, so any of the popular SSGs will be good enough for you. Pick one written in a language you already know, or pick one in a language you would like to learn. Some of the first Ruby code I wrote was a Jekyll plugin that I crudely hacked together. It worked fine. Jekyll is fast enough. Otherwise, there are plenty to choose from[0].

[0]: https://www.staticgen.com/

If you are still undecided to go static or not, I would recommend checking out Grav. We were almost going for a static generator for our blog (we were between Hugo and Jekyll) when I stumbled into Grav. It's not static but it is flat-file based, which as it turns out gave to us exactly what we needed, a serverless solution (all your posts are just markdown files and all your settings are yaml files) with powerful templating options.

https://getgrav.org/

EDIT: typos

Better to take action now and fix it up later.

MVP: You need a domain name, some hosting, 1 index.html at root for the main menu of links and 1 new file for each blog post. Make the title of each file the same as the title of your post like "Whats-a-good-static-site-generator.html" and dump the files in root as you go, link them from the main menu. You can write your posts and make the files using any text editor.

Worry about the stack later once you have a few posts under your belt and understand your mid-term use case.

But start now.

Previous discussion about almost exactly the same topic from 17 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16346187 (89 comments)

I love Jekyll and GitHub pages for free hosting. Here’s a few clean templates I like:

https://bvallieres.com/resource/2015/07/29/jekyll.html

I was looking for one a while back and ended up making my own in PHP. I know it's not a popular language anymore but I have a PHP host where I put my websites and it's the quickest to get up and running for me. Anyway, it's on github https://github.com/sachleen/Steady and a website I made using it: https://github.com/sachleen/SacSciOly | http://sacramentoscienceolympiad.com

I tried all the others and none worked for me. Had to install all these new development environments, lots of issues setting up the local servers and building sites, etc. It's not perfect and I probably would not recommend it to anyone else (no docs yet, after all), but it works for me and doesn't take too much time to throw something together if you want simplicity.

I am using nikola: https://getnikola.com/

The main reason is, that I really like jupyter notebooks and my blog began as experiments in Jupyter that I wanted to somehow preserve, i.e. http://notes.asaleh.net/posts/monoid-pattern-in-python/

Second reason is, that I like to experiment with format of my posts quite often (several were made in org-mode, i.e: http://notes.asaleh.net/posts/experimenting-with-purescripts...)

But it depends on what you want. I decided I want to write. So I focused on on writing and experimenting and try not to spend too much time on setup :-)

Good luck with your blog!

I hope 2018 here means cool and new solution that's different from previous ones in many ways - GatsbyJS

This might be an unpopular opinion, but really wouldn’t sweat all the details just yet. I’d just start with something simple, free and widely used just so you get into the rhythm of blogging. An existing service probably, Wordpress would even suffice - I use Posthaven but it’s $5/month. You can focus on getting the perfect backend later, but I’d focus on writing the posts themselves and getting into the rhythm of writing to a schedule. Many well-intentioned blogs fall into disuse long before they outgrow their tech stack.

After you’ve put a dozen or so posts together you’ll have a better feel for what your needs are and you can then migrate your posts to the new platform of your choice - you can even write a blog post about it :-)

I built a JavaScript static site generator last year, works good for me. It uses github issues but makes it static.

https://github.com/geekodour/gitpushblog

Pelican (python) and Hugo were the ones I looked at before I decided to write my own toy SSG (python) for the heck of it. If you’re looking for something simple that you can build on, with support for Markdown, Jinja2 and static pages, take a look at https://github.com/amithmathew/pyjello If somebody wants to contribute, I’m happy to accept pull requests.

In my experience, static site generators are not a complete solution. Unless you are satisfied with the default look and feel of generated pages (or a theme available), even Jekyll needs some tinkering, debugging and diving into the code.

So, in case you need customizaton: just stick with any static site generator written in a familiar language and don't be afraid to fiddle with generation process.

I've personally been meaning to rebuild my personal site with Next.js: https://github.com/zeit/next.js/

Used it to build a few static sites at work and have quite enjoyed it as you get to use React.

I use (and like) Lektor. It's very flexible and easy to get started with. Hugo was another contender, but I found it very hard to understand and work with, and it took some hacks to do a very simple thing I wanted, so I abandoned it quickly.

I used Github Pages which are Jekyll sites hosted by Github, which is sufficient for my needs and has a wealth of online documentation.

If it's for blogging, you can also take a look at Blogger, half the programming & security blogs I follow are on it.

Have a look at https://cuttlebelle.com

It was specifically built to help non technical people edit and compose pages. (which is not you :) )

How I did mine with Github Pages and Pelican:

http://bytepawn.com/how-to-make-a-blog-like-this.html

If you prefer Vue over React there is also https://nuxtjs.org/ which I found nice to work with.

I don’t know the right answer for you (probably depends on the language you know best or want to learn) but the “standard” is Jekyll in terms of maturity and acceptance.

I quite like Metalsmith (http://www.metalsmith.io/

Gatsby is worth taking a look at.

If you like React, you should check out https://github.com/nozzle/react-static

To me, fretting frameworks is a form of writer's block.

Well, this thread got nuked didn't it? From first page to page 5 in under a few hours...

ikiwiki

Just use Getpublii https://getpublii.com

Its really different than other generators - it's a static CMS with GUI and themes. Comes with WP migrator, GitHub pages, Netlify, S3, Google cloud or sftp.

I would argue, unless you specifically NEED the blog format for some reason, to use whatever you use for your project documentation.

i.e. if you program mostly with python then use Restructured Text and sphinx, etc.

Why? because then you can't say you are unfamiliar with the tools when it comes time to writing docs for your project, something we all suck at doing.

Git and GitHub Pages: Simple to set up and use, supports Markdown and code snippets.

Other than that I've never really understood the appeal of static site generators for normal websites or blogs that don't have millions of monthly page views.

Tools like Hugo for many common use cases (like ordinary websites with ordinary scalability requirements) often come across as a solution desperately looking for a problem while at the same time creating a few new problems: Compared with dynamic website software like WordPress they can be difficult to set up and they tend to be more difficult to use, especially for non-technical users.

Hugo. And done!