Writing your own Static Site Generator

The background

Static site generators (SSGs) are engines¹ that use text input files to generate static web pages, these generated sites do not require a backend afterwards, making them primary entities on content delivery networks (CDNs). Further, since the lack of a backend, static site generators inherently have a reduced attack surface², minimizing potential vulnerabilities.

I’ve been using Hugo³ since I started writing a tech blog, which has proved to be great on it’s own along with a cool ecosystem. My pleasant experience with Hugo led me to use it on other blogs as well, where I write about other subtle stuff that fits better on their own pages. In a previous post⁴, I’ve written about how GitHub Actions are used for building the Hugo blogs automatically triggered by a commit to the GH repository where the source resides. While the blog sites used to be hosted on GH pages, they have been moved on⁵ to Cloudflare Pages since.

The project

It’s been quite some time since I started a new project, and then I stumbled upon this submission⁶ on HN. This gave me an idea: let’s build an SSG. At first I was all excited and planned to write one in C++, which would output static sites in record time. However, knowing about my attention spans from experience, I decided to use Python which would probably make building the actual thing much faster for me, and then Pysen⁷ came to be. Most of it’s functionalities are already implemented, and more are yet to be implemented⁸. For the time being, the SSG is being “dogfooded”⁹ at one of my blogs¹⁰. Let’s see how things take shape as the days roll by—fast!

Wrote a new verse at https://hasithsen.pages.dev/verse/building-is-fun/ to celebrate building stuff, and yes, the last line is hinting at that quote in the awesome book Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint Exupéry.