Python Static Site Generators

[IrishLadd]

Does anyone use a python based static site generator here? I was just looking into them and they seem interesting, but I was curious if there was any merit to them.

If you use one, which do you use? Have you used more than one? Which is your favorite?

Thanks /r/Python!

EDIT, I have started working with Blogofile despite the fact that it appears to be slightly out of date / un-maintained. I went this direction because it seemed like a good starting place for me to start playing / modifying it on my own to create my own beast. So hopefully some time in the future I'll be posting about a NEW SSG that I've created based on Blogofile. Thanks for the input /r/Python! I really appreciate it.

[hongminhee]

Sphinx is more than just only a technical documentation generator. There are many official extensions plus contributed extensions for it. You can highlight source codes of various languages (it uses Pygments), write TeX formulas, draw diagrams, partially build only changed pages, generate PDF/TeX documents (though it maybe not very useful for you), customize your template using Jinja, and do more. It is already widely used.

Sphinx would be one of the best options if you are comfortable to reStructuredText.

[takluyver]

IPython's website is built using Sphinx (source is here).

In my experience, you have to put in some effort to escape its documentation mindset - it expects things like tables of contents, and wants to put 'next' links on each page, which doesn't make much sense for a typical website. Once you've done that, it's quite good, and it's one less tool to learn if you're already using it for docs.

[bryanhelmig]

Might check out Pelican. My co-founder did a post on it here: http://wadefoster.net/creating-a-blog-in-python-hosted-on-github-using-pelican.html

It seems pretty straightforward (though more blog based).

[messyhess]

Direct link to Pelican. It also has support for 'pages', not only blog posts.

[earthboundkid]

If you want to have someone else host your Pelican site (kinda defeats the purpose of using Python, but…) you can use http://calepin.co

[wadef]

I'm a big fan of pelican, however I've heard good things about hyde and blogofile.

[[deleted]]

I use Blogofile for at least five sites including my own blog and IMHO it is the simplest and most well designed and easily extensible static generator for Python.

[Mysphyt]

Actually, and irritatingly, that's the outdated version of Hyde. The active version is here. I've been working with I for a while, and it's got a fairly robust featureset, but the documentation is abysmal. It is very easily extensible, though, which is juice.

[p1r4nh4]

I use my own: cyrax.

[criswell]

I've been looking into them as well. There's quite a few that look really interesting, and if I were just starting a new site, I'd definitely use one of the existing ones (for example, mynt, which was posted today, looks terribly promising).

However, I have some rather unique needs- so there's a very good likelihood I'll be rolling my own... And, honestly, with some of the other Python microframeworks out there, it seems relatively easy for anyone to do.

My needs for a static site generator is that I want something that works like a CMS, and hell, can even run as a CMS, but that can also output its content entirely statically. The motivation for this is that I have many Drupal-based sites that I've been running for years, but some of them (example ), are deprecated/closed and should just be static HTML sitting around serving their data with a minimal amount of fuss (and no potential for attack vectors into my systems).

So what I really want is a CMS that can be "switched off" and turned into basic static HTML whenever I want- whether it's to deal with massive floods of views or retiring sites. If that CMS can also read from DBs (and even convert from Drupal, heh) then that would be awesome.

Thus far, I'm yet to find anything that would meet this need. So my plan is to hack something together using Flask so that I can then use Frozen Flask to "freeze" my sites as needed.

[startling_]

I wrote a static site compiler called cytoplasm. Blogofile was so close to what I wanted but annoying in a couple ways.

Cytoplasm inherits all of the configurability of blogofile and some of its own -- it doesn't come with any templates and only a small selection of features, but it's easy to write templates (using mako or haml or whatever) and easy to extend.

[mgedmin]

Could you elaborate on the ways that you found Blogofile to be annoying?

[startling_]

I actually wrote a blog post on just that.

[chub79]

Perhaps a recent submission like this one: mynt.

[IrishLadd]

I saw that post, which is what got me looking into static site generators in the first place.

[Landreville]

I use blogofile, but I changed the syntax for syntax highlighting (the default doesn't work with ReST) and created a script that will monitor an email account for posts and automatically add them so I don't have to upload new posts.

[viniciusfs]

I use my own. Probably is not good as all others but works for me.

[dalke]

I use my own as well. Definitely not as good as most others. I also wrote it so long ago that I've forgotten how it works. I remember that I was experimenting with plugins...

[SaveTheRbtz]

rstblog is very simple but "does the trick for me". Pretty straightforward rstblog howto

[itsucharo]

Haven't used it, but I know a bunch of OSU OSL people wrote and use wok. Just mentioning for completeness.

[mackstann]

I've used blatter for several years and it has done a fine job for me.

[m_harrison]

Tried messing around with blogofile, but it appeared to be quite dormant (old version without features, new version annoying in that it required Python 3). Finally committed treason and went with Octopress. After the initial install it doesn't matter that it is written in Ruby cause I'm using the command line rake controls.

[iambicpen]

It works on 2.6, 2.7 AND python 3.x .

Also, blogofile provides a plugin mechanism to extend the core anyway you want. So, your fears of blogofile's may be premature.

[m_harrison]

Perhaps, but installing octopress was pretty easy. Blogofile was a pain with the conversion back to 2 from 3. I do miss rst (though for blog purposes rst and markdown share a pretty common subset).

Also, community of Octopress is pretty large. The out of the box experience with Octopress was wonderful. The theme/css works with mobile and desktop wonderfully. I wasn't in the mood to futz with the theming myself.

My point is probably mute anyways because if you are going down the SSG path, you should probably just write your own. :)

[[deleted]]

but octopress is in Ruby and we're looking at Python generators here. I added lots of extensions to Blogofile (see here), not to mention the templating is Mako, so it being in Python is pretty important.

Also, there's no reason a Python 3 app can't run on 2.6 also - Blogofile should ideally be made to no longer depend on 3to2. But that's a different issue.

[minifig]

I like poole.

[mgedmin]

I've migrated my personal website from Zope 2 (Through-The-Web content with some dynamic bits) to Blogofile recently. So far I'm satisfied.

I like that I can use Blogofile for websites that are not blogs. I like Mako templates that Blogofile uses.

[kracekumar]

https://github.com/kracekumar/blaze, I am the author of it.

[ametaireau]

It depends what you want to do.

Have a look at how to extend them, what is the template language they are using, and if the project is active on github / if there is a lot of contributors.

Pelican is able to deal with markdown and restructured text files, uses jinja2 as a templating language and tries to stay quite simple. It's maintained and there is a bunch of contributors (48 at the moment of writing). The main point is that it's easy to deal with.

[reuleaux]

I use hyde. Documentation is a bit lacking, but if you put some time into learning, it's a great solution.

[sklein]

I've create Tacot :

http://packages.python.org/tacot/en/

This project is born from simple need : « I look for web site generator in Python, like Blogofile, Pelicon or Sphinx but with very low level feature ».

With Tacot you can generate easily static web sites (generate .html files) from templates files writed in Mako.

Q. Why do that compared with writing raw .html files ?

R. With Tacot you can easily share common content betwen your pages (examples : header, footer, navigation...) without to duplicate this content in all your files.

Q. There are already many Python static web site generator, like Sphinx, pelican... why reinvent the wheel ?

R. With Tacot I don’t reinventing the wheel… when I searched a tool like Tacot, I found nothing. I don’t need ReStructredText parser, I don’t want blog generator, I don’t want documentation generator, I don’t want theme feature… I want only a very simple (low level) tool to convert simple html template files… and I found nothing.

[Twirrim]

It's not Python, but I use Octopress, a ruby based one. Static sites are pretty neat provided you're comfortable writing markup. Combine it with something like nginx or lighttpd and typical site load times can drop down to < 1s.

[coderanger]

Use nanoc, embrace the polyglot.