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zola — An opinionated static site generator with everything built-in.

zola (né Gutenberg) A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in. Documentation is available on its site or in the docs/co
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Category: Rust / Static Site Generators
Watchers: 83
Star: 12k
Fork: 857
Last update: Dec 6, 2023
Resource links
https://www.getzola.org
https://github.com/getzola/zola

zola (né Gutenberg)

Build Status

A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in.

Documentation is available on its site or in the docs/content folder of the repository and the community can use its forum.

Comparisons with other static site generators

Zola Cobalt Hugo Pelican
Single binary yes yes yes no
Language Rust Rust Go Python
Syntax highlighting yes yes yes yes
Sass compilation yes yes yes yes
Assets co-location yes yes yes yes
Multilingual site ehh no yes yes
Image processing yes no yes yes
Sane & powerful template engine yes yes ehh yes
Themes yes no yes yes
Shortcodes yes no yes yes
Internal links yes no yes yes
Link checker yes no no yes
Table of contents yes no yes yes
Automatic header anchors yes no yes yes
Aliases yes no yes yes
Pagination yes no yes yes
Custom taxonomies yes no yes no
Search yes no no yes
Data files yes yes yes no
LiveReload yes no yes yes
Netlify support yes no yes no
Vercel support yes no yes yes
Breadcrumbs yes no no yes
Custom output formats no no yes no

Supported content formats

  • Zola: markdown
  • Cobalt: markdown
  • Hugo: markdown, asciidoc, org-mode
  • Pelican: reStructuredText, markdown, asciidoc, org-mode, whatever-you-want

ehh explanations

Hugo gets ehh for the template engine because while it is probably the most powerful template engine in the list (after Jinja2) it personally drives me insane, to the point of writing my own template engine and static site generator. Yes, this is a bit biased.

Zola gets ehh for multi-language support as it only has a basic support and does not (yet) offer things like i18n in templates.

Pelican notes

Many features of Pelican come from plugins, which might be tricky to use because of a version mismatch or inadequate documentation. Netlify supports Python and Pipenv but you still need to install your dependencies manually.

235 Open More issues
Closed

Review usage of Rayon & improve performance

It looks like the site loading is done in parallel but the rendering is not: threads are spawned but only one seem used.

TODOs:

  • review Site::render_section to ensure it uses as many threads as possible efficiently, might be a case of using https://docs.rs/rayon/1.0.2/rayon/iter/trait.IndexedParallelIterator.html#method.with_min_len
  • review other usages of rayon, maybe some are detrimental to performances.

There are some benches in site/benches but you will need to run the gen.py first to generate some. Given the current speed, the medium-blog and medium-kb are probably the best ones to run.

done enhancement good first issue help wanted 
opened Sep 11, 2018 by Keats 74
Closed

Renaming the project

With WordPress starting to heavily promote their Gutenberg editor, SEO will become impossible for this project.

I'm open to changing the name, the current requirements are:

  • simple to type, binary name must not exist in windows/linux/osx already
  • a cheap domain name for the docs must be available
  • no significant open-source project with the same name
  • no obvious weird meaning in languages

Current ideas:

  • zola: from Emile Zola, a french writer - 4 letters is pretty good. Downside is Hugo is also a french writer
  • kuo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shen_Kuo

Changing the name means also changing every package manager + netlify

Feedback wanted help wanted question 
opened Aug 22, 2018 by Keats 50
Closed

Underscores in slugs get converted to hyphen-minus and other slugification issues

I have a content file named rust-cfg_attr.md on my Zola 0.8.0 site.

Zola ignores what I deliberately typed as the slug, and turns the _ into -, yielding rust-cfg-attr. This makes me unhappy.

I expect Zola to make no modifications at all to the slug that I specify, so that I can do things how I want to, e.g. Do_things_like_Wikipedia if I really want to.

enhancement good first issue help wanted 
opened Aug 7, 2019 by chris-morgan 40
Closed

`draft` field does not draft an article.

Bug Report

I'm not sure this is a bug. I think I'm doing something wrong. I will apreciate any help.

Environment

Zola version: 0.8.0 System: Windows 10 with WSL (Ubuntu)

Expected Behavior

It should not render draft pages. (?)

Current Behavior

It render draft pages when I use {% for page in section.pages %} in a section or index.

Step to reproduce

  • Create a Zola website.
  • Create a index.md template and use {% for page in section.pages %} to list pages.
  • Put draft = true in a markdown file in the content directory to try to draft it.
  • $ zola serve

This is my code

The index.html

{% extends "base.html" %}

{% block content %}
<section>
  <ul>
  {% for page in section.pages %}
    <li><a href="{{ page.permalink }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
  {% endfor %}
  </ul>
</section>
{% endblock content %}

My _index.md under content/

+++
+++

And the article itself, also under content/:

+++
title = "Article 1"
draft = true
date = 2019-07-10T14:00:00-06:00
+++

This is the content of article one.
done 
opened Jul 10, 2019 by ozkxr 35
Closed

Put it on package managers

Once 0.1 is reached

  • [x] AUR: https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/ripgrep for ripgrep for example

I think brew is used on mac? Any mac user around?

opened Mar 24, 2017 by Keats 35
Closed

Sorting previous/next semantics for weight

The current semantic of prev/next on page seem wrong when looking at weights

Given 3 posts with date [2017-01-01, 2018-01-01, 2019-01-01]. The pages will be sorted in a descending order (2019, 2018, 2017) and the pages will have the following next/prev:

  • 2019 => next = None, previous = 2018
  • 2018 => next = 2019, previous = 2017
  • 2017 => next = 2018, previous = None

The next/previous make sense here since we are talking about the next blog post would be the most recent and the previous as the older one.

Enter order and we get what we would expect:

3 posts with order = [3, 2, 1]

Expectations:

  • 3 => next = None, previous = 2
  • 2 => next = 3, previous = 1
  • 1 => next = 2, previous = None

Lastly, weight:

3 posts with weight = [1, 2. 3]

Expectations:

  • 1 => next = 2, previous = None
  • 2 => next = 3, previous = 1
  • 3 => next = None, previous = 2

Currently, the previous and next are reversed for weight which makes sense since both date/order work that way but weight actually works the other way semantically: it's ascending. I think it would make sense to inverse setting next/previouswhen weight is used to match the expectations.

2 questions:

  • am I getting something wrong with my expectations about the weight ordering?
  • would switching the next/previous for weight make sense to everyone?

cc @codesections

opened Jul 17, 2018 by Keats 31
Open

Add --force/-f flag to init, for creation in non-empty dir

Sorry for not discussing this first. I needed the feature for my own good, since I was about to create my first Zola web site (:tada:) tonight and I had the previous (Jekyll) version of the site in a submodule already. It was easier/more fun to try to add this missing flag to Zola rather than trying to workaround it... :see_no_evil:

Note that --force is not as evil as one might think in this case. It merely bypasses the "folder exists" check. We could do a real --force flag that overwrites any existing content & configuration, but that's definitely something much more dangerous than what this PR aims to achieve.

Sanity check:

  • [x] Have you checked to ensure there aren't other open Pull Requests for the same update/change?

Code changes

(Delete or ignore this section for documentation changes)

  • [x] Are you doing the PR on the next branch?

If the change is a new feature or adding to/changing an existing one:

  • [x] Have you created/updated the relevant documentation page(s)?
opened Jun 16, 2020 by perlun 0
Open

Included content on homepage is not rebuilt on change

Bug Report

When changing content on a file in the content folder, the direct page that contains the content is rebuilt but pages that indirectly include it don't.

A concrete example: Imagine I have a blog and the home page is just a pagination of those posts with a title and a short summary. If I change the content of a blog post (e.g. fix a typo), the page of the post is rebuilt but the home-page is not.

This is especially relevant if you like building websites using partials (like me). For example, for modularity, my home page is built using several {% include "partial.html" %} that pull in their own content, and every time I modify that content I have to kill zola serve and restart it, which is extremely annoying.

Environment

Zola version: 0.10.1 Local forlder: a fresh zola init folder Theme: Any (I tested it with zola-pickle)

Expected Behavior

Pages that include content should be rebuilt when content is changed. This is especially

Current Behavior

Pages that indirectly include content either through using an {% include %} block or other variables are not rebuilt

Step to reproduce

  • use zola init to make a new website
  • install a theme (I used zola-pickle)
  • create a content file that get's included in the homepage
  • run zola serve
  • change something in the content file that get's included
  • observe that the home page is not updated.

final suggestions

I get that tracing these kinds of dependencies could be tricky given that you could pull in content from any page with e.g. get_section or something similar. Personally I think this problem would also be solved by adding a cli option to rebuild zola from scratch every time, which given the performance of zola and the scale of the projects people seem to be using it for, imo would be an acceptable solution, even if it's less elegant.

opened Jun 15, 2020 by dvente 1
Open

Add support for SVG files to `get_image_metadata` (Fixes #769)

This is the second attempt to fix #769. 🤞 Tested it on my blog and it was working nicely.

Tried a couple of variants to write the size calculation idiomatically, but if anyone has a better idea, I'm open for suggestions.

Important caveat

If a user works with SVGs on their site and an SVG neither provides width/height nor viewport information and the user is calling get_image_metadata(), the build will fail with an error message, because zola could not determine the image proportions. I think that's an acceptable tradeoff, though as the user was explicitly asking for the metadata in a template. I'd even go so far to say that it's expected behavior to stop compilation instead of silently rendering with missing image proportions, but it's certainly something to be aware of.

opened Jun 15, 2020 by mre 1
Open

Binary size exploded between 0.10.1 and 0.11.0

Bug Report

Environment

Zola version: 0.11.0

Expected Behaviour

The zola binary should have stayed around ~16 MiB in size once stripped, maybe increasing a bit or decreasing a bit.

Current Behaviour

Instead it went up to 91 MiB, which is way heavier than it should be given the changelog.

Step to reproduce

  • Build 0.10.1
  • Build 0.11.0
  • Compare their binary size.

cargo-bloat could possibly help you figure what additional data is being put in the binary, or maybe a review of your dependencies.

Other than that, thanks for Zola, I just started using it and it looks super nice!

enhancement good first issue help wanted 
opened Jun 15, 2020 by linkmauve 2
Open

[RFC] non-HTML output

I'm posting this for discussion. Feedback is welcome and I'm willing to work on this.

I'll switch my own gemini site to use this probably this weekend.

Support non-HTML templates

  • allow templates with any file extension
  • use the template extension for output filenames
  • add plain_content that has been rendered with Tera, but not markdown->HTML
  • add simple example/test: test_site_gemini
  • write basic documentation

See discussion in issue #905.

IMPORTANT: Please do not create a Pull Request adding a new feature without discussing it first.

The place to discuss new features is the forum: https://zola.discourse.group/ If you want to add a new feature, please open a thread there first in the feature requests section.

Sanity check:

  • [x] Have you checked to ensure there aren't other open Pull Requests for the same update/change?

Code changes

(Delete or ignore this section for documentation changes)

  • [x] Are you doing the PR on the next branch?

If the change is a new feature or adding to/changing an existing one:

  • [x] Have you created/updated the relevant documentation page(s)?
opened Jun 11, 2020 by dancek 1
Open

[i18n] Please use Fluent for localization

Dissatisfied with other current static site generators (I currently have Hexo, Hugo, Jekyll, & custom sites deployed) I was poking around the field and ran across this project. I'm actually pretty excited about it, but for my use cases internationalization is pretty much the biggest stumbling block. I see this project is only just starting to dabble in it. Please please consider using Fluent for all localization except perhaps Markdown body content. This is something most other site generators get wrong. Most of them try to use YAML or JSON key/value lists to localize the generated site UI. That approach simply isn't good enough.

I might even be able to contribute some to implementing this. The Rust bindings for Fluent are quite good and I've done some work with them before.

opened Jun 9, 2020 by alerque 2

Contents

    Elderjs Elder.js is an opinionated static site generator and web framework for Svelte built with SEO in mind.
    natemoo-re A fast, opinionated static site generator powered by Snowpack.
    sorbits Static site generator which is semi-compatible with Jekyll
    knadh dirmaker is a simple, opinionated static site generator for quickly publishing directory websites.
    brandonweiss ⚡️ An opinionated, zero-config static site generator.
    PeopleForBikes PeopleForBikes community site
    react-static ⚛️ 🚀 A progressive static site generator for React.
    ppeetteerrs A no-brainer solution to turning your Obsidian PKM into a Zola site.
    decaporg A Git-based CMS for Static Site Generators
    saleina Saleina CMS A static site content management system built with vue using git as a backend.
    peaceiris GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages 🚀 Deploy static files and publish your site easily. Static-Site-Generators-friendly.
    lucas-aragno Static site generator using next and tachyons
    ruanyf an extremely easy static site generator of markdown documents
    cusiman7 Static Fire is an engine for creating static websites, primarily blogs.
    dbelyaeff Modern static websites generator (Node.JS/Webpack)
    Wyamio A modular static content and static site generator.
    ulkajs ulkajs is a static site genrator that helps to create static sites from ulka and markdown files.
    infiniteluke A simple static blog powered by next.js
    elmasse A static site generator with markdown + react for Next.js
    Pawka Phrozn is extremely flexible static site generator in PHP.
    jaywcjlove ⚛️📄🚀 Fast static site generator for React, Just write Markdown file. @react-doc
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