Show HN: Bearclaw – tiny static site generator with RSS

hey yall, I made bearclaw because I just wanted an unopinionated static site generator with no toolchain and fancy stuff going on; it'd be my pleasure to show it to you today and answer any questions you might have.

If you do end up trying out bearclaw, you can use nginx or your favorite webserver. Earlier this week I made eclaire - a static site webserver with compression, caching, and automatic HTTPS through letsencrypt. https://github.com/donuts-are-good/eclaire

Show HN: Bearclaw – tiny static site generator with RSS
github.com

Looks cool! What are it's advantages over hugo?

Recent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34868392

Hey there, thanks for asking. There are precompiled versions of it so you can run it like an .exe if you want to.

You can grab one of the binaries here [0] for your system, then put your markdown content in the markdown folder that bearclaw makes when you run it the first time. Bearclaw puts the html it generates in the output folder. If you want to, you can tell markdown to just keep an eye on the folder and it will generate the output as you make it, like if you have a webserver pointing at your output/ folder.

From there it's up to you, you can put it on github, or use your own server with nginx or apache or caddy.

[0] - https://github.com/donuts-are-good/bearclaw/releases/tag/1.1...

I got really frustrated with Hugo yesterday when I couldn't add a page with just a list of all my posts on it. I spent a few hours playing around with a bunch of different options, Hexo seemed to come the closest to something I could fire up and just drop my existing markdown in (though it did blow up on a youtube embedded player I had in one post).

Bearclaw does look super simple to get going, but seemed to be missing a few things I was hoping for:

  - No real documentation, so I copied my markdown files over.
  - Ran bearclaw and put the output in a web accessible location.
  - Went there and there was no index.html (though "home" on the "posts" page seems to link to it).
  - The "posts.html" page just has filenames, so it doesn't seem to pick up the frontmater.

It's definitely leaning in the direction I was looking for, but maybe a little too far. :-)