Introduction

website-generator is a static-site generator written in Node.js, which aims to:

• offer only essential static-site generation capabilities;
• follow a Markdown-driven site structure;
• generate accessible HTML from Markdown; and
• support customisation when it is reasonable to do so.

It is not intended for production environments or large-scale applications.

Feature comparison

Inspired by the feature comparison page of ack, which is in turn inspired by a blog post by Andy Lester.

The following static-site generators can all achieve what website-generator does:

• Eleventy;
• Hexo;
• Hugo; and
• Jekyll (the first static-site generator I used).

The above list is not exhaustive and only based on first-hand experience. Jamstack contains a comprehensive list of most static-site generators that can filter by language, license or popularity.

Dependencies

website-generator is built and uses the following packages and technologies:

• remarkable for parsing Markdown;
• Handlebars template language for writing templates;
• PostCSS for processing CSS at build time;
• gray-matter for parsing front-matter;
• DOMPurify and jsdom for sanitising HTML output;
• TOML for defining front-matter;
• tape and nyc for unit testing and code coverage; and
• TypeScript for local development.

History

website-generator was written in June 2021 as a response to many static-site generators at the time not allowing the HTML output of footnotes in Markdown (recognised as [^1]) to be customised.

Despite many static-site generators now supporting this level of customisation, development on website-generator has continued as a side project and as a means of avoiding dependency on an external ecosystem.

While only ever intended to be used locally, a public repository was created as encouragement to present the project at a high standard.