I wrote this static site generator to create my personal site, garrettgoss.com. See my blog post here for a more in-depth introduction.

These instructions will build the included example site, from test posts and templates.

Clone the repo to your local machine. For example:

git clone https://github.com/ggoss/sitegen

cd into the repo folder:

cd sitegen

Create the virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv

Activate it:

source ./venv/bin/activate

Install dependencies:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

NOTE: if you'd like to be able to losslessly reduce svg assets as part of the site generation process, download one of the pre-built releases of svgcleaner from https://github.com/RazrFalcon/svgcleaner/releases, and extract it to sitegen/svgcleaner. There are no svgs in the included example site, so you can get started without this.

The test site should be successfully built to sitegen/output and served to http://localhost:8000

python3 sitegen.py

During the build, you should see something like this:

(venv) garrett@garrett-laptop:~/projects/sitegen$ python3 sitegen.py

Generating site.
---------------
[ 0.22 s] Cached post database not found. Initializing post database...
[ 0.22 s] Updating post database...
[ 1.41 s] Creating output directories...
[ 1.41 s] Generating pages for each post...
[ 1.46 s] Generating "all-topics" page...
[ 1.46 s] Generating "all-posts" page...
[ 1.46 s] Generating blog index...
[ 1.50 s] Caching posts...
[ 1.50 s] Caching images...
[ 1.51 s] Done.

Previewing site.
---------------
Serving to http://localhost:8000
Press CTRL+C to quit.

Subsequent builds should be faster, as previously-processed images (scaled and compressed) are cached and copied (rather than re-processed):

(venv) garrett@garrett-laptop:~/projects/sitegen$ python3 sitegen.py

Generating site.
---------------
[ 0.18 s] Copying cached images to output directory...
[ 0.19 s] Loading cached post database...
[ 0.19 s] Updating post database...
[ 0.20 s] Creating output directories...
[ 0.20 s] Generating pages for each post...
[ 0.24 s] Generating "all-topics" page...
[ 0.25 s] Generating "all-posts" page...
[ 0.25 s] Generating blog index...
[ 0.29 s] Caching posts...
[ 0.29 s] Caching images...
[ 0.29 s] Done.

Previewing site.
---------------
Serving to http://localhost:8000
Press CTRL+C to quit.

See here for a summary of current features.

Most settings can be configured in sitegen/sitegen/config.py.

If you'd like blog-post comments to work, go to https://utteranc.es/ and configure a comments repo. In the included blog-post template sitegen/templates/blog-post.html, replace "[ENTER REPO HERE]" with the repo you created.

To change the look and feel of the site, modify the included html templates and CSS (sitegen/templates/assets/css/styles.css) with reckless abandon. Sitegen uses Jinja2 for templating, so you have a ton of freedom here.

Sitegen is licensed under the MIT License.