A Lightweight Static Blog Generator in Go

Nov 12, 2015

From its start, this blog had been a custom built website using a combination of Jade for templates and Markdown for posts that were then generated to static HTML files by Harp.

Why Another Static Blog Generator?

I wanted to switch to some static blog generator because it was a little tedious to add new posts to the blog, but couldn't decide which one to use.

What I looked for:

1. No installation. Just download a binary and that's all.

2. Easy to use. Simply create a Markdown file in the posts directory and that's enough to add a new post. No need for databases, projects, configurations, etc.

3. No metadata. No need to include special metadata in posts, like title, date or tags. It should be possible to parse these things from the post structure. In other words, I wanted a post to look like a post on its own.

Introducing LitePub

As I couldn't find a static blog generator that would meet my needs I decided to write LitePub. I use it to generate this blog and it meets all my requirements:

• it's a single binary
• to create a new post I just add an .md file to the posts directory
• title, date and tags (not supported yet) are parsed from the first lines of posts

If you're interested, download a release and follow the quick start to create a sample blog.