bckt

bckt (pronounced "bucket") is one more static site generator.

bckt is designed to blend different kinds of content into a single site, so you can mix long-form posts, link logs, photos, and other content -your personal content bucket :-)

It ships with a clean theme, incremental rebuilds, and a minimal toolchain so you can publish from Markdown or hand-written HTML without ceremony.

[!WARNING] bckt is expected to run in a trusted envioronment, where templates and content can be trusted (like your own machine). Using it to render third-party content (for example a public bckt-SaaS) is not recommended yet.

Highlights

• Fast incremental renders with optional watch mode (bckt dev).
• Theme-first workflow powered by MiniJinja templates (themes/bckt3).
• Built-in client-side search index generation and custom template filters.
• Straightforward YAML front matter with automatic tags and archive pages.

Pre-built binaries live on the releases page. You can also compile locally with cargo install --path ..

Demo

bckt ships with two demo content sets you can use to try out a theme before writing your own posts.

microblog — short titleless notes, good for micro and microx:

mkdir myblog && cd myblog
bckt init --theme microx --demo microblog
bckt dev

articles — longer posts with titles, good for modern, bckt3, plain, rntz:

mkdir myblog && cd myblog
bckt init --theme modern --demo articles
bckt dev

You can combine any theme with any demo. To try a different theme on the same demo content:

bckt themes install micro
bckt themes use micro
bckt render

The six bundled themes are: bckt3, micro, microx, modern, plain, rntz.

You can also check blog.vrypan.net — a live site built with bckt and a slightly modified default theme — and steve.photo, built using bckt and bckt-photo (see Extras).

Get Started

bckt init  --theme bckt3       # scaffold posts/, templates/, skel/, bckt.yaml
# edit bckt.yaml
bckt-new --title "Hello"      # scaffold a new post (prompts for missing fields)
bckt render                   # generate html/
bckt dev --verbose            # preview with live reload

Deploy by publishing the generated html/ directory with any static host.

Documentation

Detailed guides live in docs/:

• Posts organization, frontmatter, and .bcktignore for excluding directories
• Theme structure (templates, pages, static assets)
• Attachment metadata (file sizes and MIME types) in templates
• Custom MiniJinja filters such as format_date
• Client-side search integration and configuration tips

Contributing

cargo fmt
cargo clippy -- -D warnings
cargo test

Issues and pull requests are welcome.

Extras

bckt-blog-template

bckt-blog-template is a ready-to-use GitHub repo template. Create a new repo and start blogging. No need to install anything.

bckt-mcp

bckt-mcp is an experimental MCP server you can run locally and helps you create posts from your favorite MCP-enabled AI tool. It takes care of frontmatter, filenames, and filepaths.

bckt-photo

bckt-photo: command line tool written that creates bckt blog posts from image files using their EXIF data. It comes with a theme designed for photography blogs.