Perron 1.0 here is here

Nine months ago, I introduced Perron, an OSS Rails-based static site generator. 190 commits and 18 releases later, lots of bugfixes and many new features—by yours truly and a few others—have been added. Today I am thrilled to announce Perron 1.0. 🥳

Want to check it out right away? Check out the docs, star it on GitHub or explore the showcase to see what others have built. 😻

Programmatic SEO

One of the most exciting features has been the ability to generate content programmatically. Whether you are building a SaaS directory, product comparison pages or anything else that mixes data with thousands of pages, with Perron this is now super easy.

Learn more about programmatic content creation.

Pull content using third-party APIs

Your content does not have to live in markdown files or data files. Building on top of the same sources feature that powers Perron’s programmatic feature, you can now pull content from third-party APIs. Great to pull content from CMS’, pull data from your GitHub account or whatever else that has an API.

Preview draft or scheduled content

This is one of those features that arrived from a personal pain: how to share a scheduled or draft article with others? Just set preview: true in the resource’s frontmatter and share the private link. Read all about it.

Live reload

Development just got faster. 🏎️💨 Perron live reloads using DOM morphing through the mata gem. It is a framework-agnostic gem I built specifically for Perron, but can be used with any Ruby framework. Watch your changes appear instantly in the browser without a full page refresh. Will announce this gem properly later. 🤫

But wait… there is more! 🤩

• Processors to transform markdown; add target=_blank to links, transform images’ paths to be absolute or create your own processors to transform HTML however you need
• Query your resources like Rails; use familiar methods like where, order and scope
• Work directly with data sources; use data from CSV, JSON and YAML files
• has_many and belongs_to; familiar class methods from Rails to associate resources with each other
• Feeds out of the box; RSS, JSON and Atom feeds are now included out-of-the-box
• Markdown support; whether you prefer kramdown, redcarpet or commonmarker, Perron works with all of them
• Display related resources; show related posts, products or any other resources on your pages
• Navigate with previous and next; built-in methods to navigate through your resources in sequence

Library additions

The library continues to grow with new snippets, components and templates:

• Full text search form; add full text search to your site (also used on the docs site)
• Filter elements; let your visitors filter content by category, tag or any other attribute
• Embed content; useful for embedding a changelog or other content from your Perron site into your app
• LLM skill; make sure your LLM agent knows its way around Perron
• Documentation template; the template that also powers the Perron docs

What’s next?

Perron 1.0 is stable and ready for production (like this very site! 💡). But this is just the beginning. The showcase is growing with sites built by the community and there is plenty more to come. 🚀🌕

A huge thank you to @ianyamey, @goose3228 and @m-lague for their contributions and feedback along the way. ❤️

If you have not tried Perron yet, now is the time to hop on. Check out the docs, explore the library and star the repo. Would love to see what you will build. 🚂