What is the simplest static site framework?

What is the most minimal, straightfoward, and simple static site generator?

Maybe not the best, but the one with fewer moving pieces and an easy onboarding.

Comments

[Quentin Delcourt]

Not a framework, but the simplest SSG for me is Eleventy: 11ty.dev/

Jekyll is great if you are used to dealing with Ruby on a day to day basis. Eleventy is JS based and as I deal with JS everyday it feels way more easier to use to me.

[Shannon Crabill]

I've been wanting to try a static site generator and Eleventy is on my list to try.

[Quentin Delcourt]

There is a clear documentation an a great community around it, which is really nice :)

Good luck on your trials ^{^}

[Sabitha Kuppusamy]

I would suggest netlify.com/. It is great for static sites. Recently, I tried using this for my react project and it is cool to use. It is integrated with Github. Whenever you make changes to your repository, the changes will be automatically reflected on your site which is hosted using netlify.

[Dmitry Vakulenko]

Pure html+css

[Ben Halpern]

I like pure HTML+css but I do think markdowns and templates are useful.

[Thomas Werner]

Then Grav is probably a perfect candidate. It uses markdown files to generate static HTML pages.

[Dmitry Vakulenko]

If you need a templates this is not a static site. So specify question if you need more correct answer.

[Roelof Jan Elsinga]

It's definitely not the easiest, but the documentation is excellent and it always has the answers I need: Jekyll.

The fact that it works with GitHub Pages without any configuration is amazing. It's not the easiest, but you have great references to get started!

Adding this to my reading list, I'm very interested to see what others post!

[Nathan Minchow]

I think Jekyll's maturity relative to the other frameworks helps a bit too. There's a lot of documentation and guides for setting things up, extending base functionally, etc.

[Alex Carpenter]

Eleventy is as simple as it gets

npm install -g @11ty/eleventy
echo '# Page header' > README.md
eleventy

[Pacharapol Withayasakpunt]

Seems to be Parcel.js bundler

You can glob -- parcel build "src/**/*.html"

11ty is another good one, but I don't know how to bundle with JSDOM or pupetter for *.11ty.js.

There is cogear.js, but it seems to be unmaintained.

[Mathieu Huot]

My SSG of choice right now is Eleventy (11ty). I like its simplicity and flexibility (it pretty much does what you want). 11ty is also Node base witch is convenient if your development environment is already Node!

[Jason Safaiyeh]

Sapper!

[Aaron Schlesinger]

I love the simplicity and power, and mad respect to the framework. That being said, I messed up a link to one of my markdown files and I took 2 hours to figure out what happened. sapper export only seemed like it gave me the last line of the exception trace 😭.

I'm a n00b to Sapper though, so I figure with some extra docs or a flag (or both!) this thing could be friendly and powerful 🎉

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

Just write your own in plain ruby with no framework.
Ruby standard has erb integrated.

I wrote one for my other startup because I wanted to just use lambda to generate out the static files instead of having to use CodeBuild.

It generates out 100,000+ of html files within a few minutes, and I just wrote a bit of logic to diff for new files.

[Ben Halpern]

Do you do markdown parsing as part of this process?

[Andrew Brown 🇨🇦]

Nope, I only use what is provided in the standard ruby library. Its nice when you don't have a gem file since it makes bundling much easer for Lambda functions.

I could certainly include RedCarpet. I believe it relies on some native extensions but I could just create a Lambda Layer if that is the case.

I have lambda functions that run queries against my RDS database and that then download data into a json file.

That json file is then read and used to generate out static files. I just pass the data to erb files.