10 best static site generators (Part 2)

We continue the review of the generators of static sites, begun in the last article .

6. Octopress

From a technical point of view, Octopress is a modified branch of Jekyll, but due to its immense popularity, it is also included in this list. Octopress is basically Jekyll for hackers (and Rails developers). Octopress is quite easy to customize, especially if you are creating a blog, as Octopress by default includes a large number of plugins that you need to run your blog on Jekyll.

From a user-defined point of view, Octopress code provides an easier way to modify and write your own code. As already mentioned, most plugins for Octopress are compatible with Jekyll (and vice versa).

To install Octopress:
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1. Copy the GitHub repository

git clone git://github.com/imathis/octopress.git octopress cd octopress 

2. Establish relationships

 gem install bundler rbenv rehash #    rbenv,   ,       bundle install 

3. Install the standard Octopress theme

 rake install 

7. Docpad

Docpad is a dynamic generator of static sites. It offers more extensive features than other static site generators, offering features such as querying a database through the query engine, importing pages from external databases, and re-displaying the web page with each query.

Docpad has built-in support for preprocessors such as Coffeescript, Stylus and LESS, and uses plugins to support template engines, preprocessors and markup languages, so you can choose any desired combinations using the required plugin. Docpad also supports importing pages from external sources such as Tumblr, GitHub, and Dropbox via plugins.

Docpad is a multifunctional platform with a huge number of plug-ins and excellent documentation. To communicate with the server, it uses Node.js, on which it is built.

Just install the docpad using

 npm: npm install -g npm; npm install -g docpad@6.78 

8. Hexo

Hexo is a lightweight shell for static blogs that has a huge site generation rate. Hexo is great for bloggers with a lot of content who need a simple static site generator. It offers a convenient migration feature from other blogging platforms such as WordPress, Joomla, Jekyll, Octopress and RSS. And the most important thing about Hexo is that most plugins created for Octopress can be used in it (and, therefore, plugins created for Jekyll with very minor changes).

Hexo supports Markdown, YAML for creating a title page and settings. And, without losing its characteristic speed, Hexo allows you to deploy on sites such as GitHub, Heroku and Rsync with just one command.

Hexo can be installed using Node.js:

 npm install hexo-cli -g 

9. Hugo

Hugo is a general purpose static site generator with excellent universal features, such as support for templates and components, pagination, and “taxonomy,” which was originally a unique categorization system inherited from Hugo. This means that you can divide posts into classes not only on the basis of tags, but also in any other way at your discretion, for example, by category or series, starting from the title page. Hugo supports three types of data files - YAML, JSON and TOML, and allows you to choose what you prefer to work with.

Hugo uses “shortcodes” instead of plugins that allow rich content to be used inside Markdown. To find out how this works, read this article. Hugo is written in the Go programming language and offers separate installation files for various platforms on its GitHub page. To learn how to install Hugo in your case, see the installation instructions for Hugo.

If you are using Homebrew, then Hugo and all interdependencies can be set using the following command:

  brew install hugo 

10. Brunch

Brunch is more focused on web applications in HTML5 than on blogs and websites, but it’s still very easy to use and fast static site generator. It not only compiles all your code and scripts, but also can automatically reduce (minimize) your code and compress images. Brunch includes a variety of plugins that you can use to tune the generator to suit your needs. A complete list of Brunch plugins can be found here.

Brunch offers “skeletons”, which are mostly templates for creating a website (or web application). It provides almost the fastest compilation speed, simply because Brunch caches all the unchanged parts of your project and compiles only those files that have changed. Brunch is built on Node.js and installed using the following command:

 npm install -g brunch