With a previous article I had told them about static websites and we were pending the enumeration of open source tools to create them
As I said at the time, static sites are not immutable, the difference with dynamic sites is that any customization is done on the client computer, not on the server. Otherwise, the files that the server shows to the client are exactly the same as those uploaded from the creator's computer.
Some open source tools for creating static sites
Jekyll
If you downloaded any projects from GitHub, you probably know GitHub Pages, the website creation and hosting service that the Microsoft repository manager offers to the projects hosted thereyou. Well, pages are created with Jekyll
To create sites with Jekill pAny Linux distribution can be used that meets the following requirements:
- Ruby programming language in version 2.5.0 or higher, including development libraries.
- RubyGems package manager.
- GCC and Make.
Markdow is used to format the textn while pFor creating templates, you have a tool called Liquid.
The result comes out in the form of HTML and CSS files.
There are plugins for the most popular content managers that allow you to migrate the content of your blog to Jekill although you will have to use a platform like Disquis to host the comments.
One point to keep in mind that if you like visual editors to write your blog post,
Hugo
Se sets to himself as "one of the most popular open source frameworks for the creation of static sites" and on his website they assure that it is "the fastest." As if promises weren't enough, its developers say it's designed to make web design fun again.
It is written in Go, an open source programming language maintained by Google and an independent community of developers.
Some of its characteristics are:
- Fast page generation (less than a minute)
- It works on Windows, Linux and Mac.
- Support for managing templates.
- Customizable links
- Taxonomy
- Support for the Disquis comment platform.
- Support for Google Analitycs.
- Creation of dynamic menus.
Hugo can be used for all types of websites and is compatible with the most popular web hosting services.b.
Hex
Designed specifically for blogging, It is based on Node.JS, a Javscript runtime based on the Google Chrome rendering engine.
The only requirement to use Hex is that The operating system has Node.js installed from version 10.13, although it is recommended to use version 12 and up.
- Fast page generation. They promise to process hundreds of files in seconds.
- Generation of sites with a single command.
- Different variants of Markdown can be used
- Powerful application programming interface to extend its features.
- Support through plugins for various template engines such as JS, Pug, Nunjucks among others.
- Integration with complementary NPM packages such as Babel, PostCSS, Less / Sass, etc.
- More than 300 customizable themes.
Docusaurus
As the name implies, this project, part of Facebook's open source initiative, specializes in creating documentation websites. Although it is intended for documentation of open source projects, it is not restricted to this use. It is based on React, a Javascript library for creating user interfaces.
Some of its characteristics are:
- Generation of HTML pages from text written using Markdown and MDX.
- Reuse of code written using React
- Automatic translation of the documentation created between 70 languages.
- Creation and maintenance of different versions of a document.
- Easy search within each document using the Algolia search engine.
- Optimized for search engines. HTML files are statically generated for every possible path
Specific page SEO
There are currently two versions of Docusaurus circulating, The link used in this article corresponds to version 2 which is the one recommended by developers for new websites.