Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

getzola.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 177 posts

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#11

Post by smt88 »

dagmx wrote: post #5
jacques_chester wrote: post #3

I tried Zola and liked the speed and simplicity. However support for its templating language is scarce and I'm not super keen on writing extensions in Rust. I have also looked at Hugo, which is determined to uphold evil and suffering by using Go's horrible templating minilanguage; Nanoc, which is cool but at times inscrutable and perhaps a little too obscure; now I'm playing with Jekyll. In short I am doing everythin…

I've been using Gatsby recently and it's been pretty good, as long as you're not opposed to node and JS.

We're looking at Gatsby now. We don't care about the language used to generate a site as long as it doesn't send silent errors into the finished result (always a concern with JS...)

What else did you try before landing on Gatsby?

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#12

Post by bachmeier »

regus wrote: post #7

I though this was about the wedding registry site at first. Anyway, I liked this line from the Github: > Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased. This seems to be the life cycle of static site generat…

The problem I see with using a SSG is that (a) it probably doesn't do what you want, combined with (b) it's designed to automate specific workflows rather than to make customization easy. There are obviously some cases for which someone else's automated workflow is useful. I'm not sure how often the tradeoff is worth it if you are proficient with a programming language that you can use to automate the workflow yourself.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#13

Post by dangoor »

jacques_chester wrote: post #3

I tried Zola and liked the speed and simplicity. However support for its templating language is scarce and I'm not super keen on writing extensions in Rust. I have also looked at Hugo, which is determined to uphold evil and suffering by using Go's horrible templating minilanguage; Nanoc, which is cool but at times inscrutable and perhaps a little too obscure; now I'm playing with Jekyll. In short I am doing everythin…

While I'm not a fan of Go's template syntax, I do appreciate that there are a bunch of themes available for Hugo, and now a pretty easy system for working with them (modules). I like not having to spend a lot of time on the formatting to get something decent.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#14

Post by endisneigh »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #10
smartmic wrote: post #8

Jamstack lists 322 static site generators plus there are probably many homemade solutions using standard unix tools etc. I am wondering if there are any unique selling points not yet covered by less than a dozen projects. Fast compilation and zero dependencies seems no fit to that category. Do not get me wrong, I really appreciate the creativity and variety of open solution, I am just wondering what it needs to get h…

What "Rust" keyword? The word "Rust" is not included in the title, or anywhere on the home page.

https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overvi...

You're right that it's not mentioned, but Zola is written in Rust. Perhaps others already knew of this?

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#15

Post by ibraheemdev »

endisneigh wrote: post #14
ibraheemdev wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "Rust" keyword? The word "Rust" is not included in the title, or anywhere on the home page.

https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/overvi... You're right that it's not mentioned, but Zola is written in Rust. Perhaps others already knew of this?

I really doubt it. (sigh, even if you don't mention Rust anywhere, people always bring this up)

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#18

Post by regus »

mroche wrote: post #4
jacques_chester wrote: post #3

I tried Zola and liked the speed and simplicity. However support for its templating language is scarce and I'm not super keen on writing extensions in Rust. I have also looked at Hugo, which is determined to uphold evil and suffering by using Go's horrible templating minilanguage; Nanoc, which is cool but at times inscrutable and perhaps a little too obscure; now I'm playing with Jekyll. In short I am doing everythin…

> by using Go's horrible templating minilanguage Any specifics that stand out to you? I haven’t done a lot with templating, but when I was investigating Hugo a while back it seemed straightforward enough. But that was at a high level.

I've used Go's templating a few times, most recently I used it in my own static site generator.

For me the most difficult thing about it is that it is another language grafted on top of Go, and it does not always do what you expect it to do.

The documentation is hard read and not always clear on how things are supposed to work.

For example:

- If I pass in a struct that contains a map of structs, how exactly can I access this data?

- How can I use the boolean output of a function within an if statement?

- How do the if statements even work? "eq"? "=="? What is the correct syntax here?

I ended up losing a lot of time having of to wrestle with the templating engine because it often would not behave the way I expected it to.

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#19

Post by axyz »

Zola seem the most popular static site generator that allows you to generate a website without any JS bundle without using some strange hack.

This is the way I firstly stumbled upon it as I was looking for a fast way to generate a fully static site with the advantages of a generator and none of the overheads...

It may be limited for certain use cases but I think it would be my first choice for editing a static site without JS

Re: Zola: A fast static site generator in a single binary

#20

Post by kylenoteboom »

alberth wrote: post #17

Tangential Related: how do people use static site generators (SSG) when they have more than 1 team member who's publishing site updates? Are they having the SSG trigger off of a git push?

Many people will have a Github Pages or GitLab Pages setup where their static website is hosted by Github or GitLab and generated by their respective continuous integration tools to automagically update the website upon pushing to the repository.
Post reply on HN