Generate resource-friendly static websites

Thanks to Rust, three new generators create static websites from Markdown very efficiently.

There are a number of legacy website generators written in Rust:

If you want to learn how to write a simple generator in Rust, you will find an interesting blog post here.

A challenge for HTML generators written in Rust is that they need a template engine that translates content with layouts into HTML pages at runtime.

The current generation of website generators implemented in Rust has learned from the ergonomics and simplicity of Nextjs, Eleventy und Gatsby - all written in Javascript - it seems.

Pylon🔗

Pylon is a static website generator that can be easily integrated into existing shell scripts. The following special features are implemented:

  • Link Checker
  • Copy data directories into the website structure
  • Global metadata can be made accessible to all pages
  • Asset are located in the same directory as the content
  • Freely definable shortcodes for use in markdown

Like Zola, Pylon uses Jinja templates implemented with Tera.

Oinky🔗

Oinky uses Handlebars as a template language to translate markdown files into a static HTML website.

The special feature of Oinky is the DSL, which allows the creation of data structures that can then be processed with handlebars.

Blades, 2020🔗

[Blades][13]is fast and reduced to the essential features. With [Ramhorns][14], Blades uses a fast, [Mustache][15] - based template engine with no if, else expressions or loops. Blades claims to be 10x faster than the speedy [Hugo][16], but doesn't provide any benchmarks to prove it.

As with Zola, themes are also supported, but the amount of style templates is limited compared to Hugo.

Conclusion🔗

If you want to process tens to hundreds of thousands of Markdown files, you can use the generators presented here to save a lot of time and maybe even money when updating static websites at high frequency.

#is_material