Blades

blazing fast
 dead simple
  static site generator

User manual

Blades is made to do one job and do it well - generate HTML files from the provided content using the provided templates.
Thanks to the amazing Ramhorns templating engine, zero-copy deserialisation and rayon parallel iterators, it renders the whole site in milliseconds, possibly up to 10 times faster than other generators like Hugo.

It's made for easy setup and use. A static site generator should be a no brainer. It uses mustache templates with extremely minimal and obvious syntax (really, like 7 rules!), while providing the necessary building blocks to let you focus on your content.

You may categorise your pages into taxonomies (like categories or tags), use the usual features like pagination or breadcrumbs and even generate image galleries.
Sitemap and RSS feed are automatically rendered.
All done without hassle, faster than you blink.

Why not blades?

Unlike other monolithic generators, Blades is modest in its scope. All it does is generating your site. It doesn't do any fancy stuff like transpiling Haskell to minified Javascript, or ever watching the site for changes. For that, you can use a dedicated tool like caretaker.

Nevertheless, if you have a feature request or ran into some issue using Blades, please submit an issue. It is a hobby project, so any contribution is welcome! :)

Why blades?

They shave the mustache off.

Installing

If you have the Rust toolchain installed, you can install Blades from Crates.io

cargo install blades

If you would like to have it included in your favourite package repository, submit an issue.

Then, you can run the executable blades with the following subcommands:

• init: Initialise the site in the current directory, creating the basic files and folders
• build: Build the site according to config, content, templates and themes in the current directory
• colocate: Move the assets from the "assets" directory and from the theme, if one is used, into the output directory
• all: Build the site and colocate the assets
• lazy: Build the site and (colocate assets only if the theme was switched) [default]
• new: Create a new page

Themes

When you specify a theme in the config, templates and assets from the theme are used. Every site that doesn't use a theme can be used as a theme for another site. Therefore, the easiest way to use a theme is to just clone the corresponding theme's repository into the themes directory. A list of available themes can be found here.

To overwrite the theme, simply use the files in the templates, resp. assets subdirectories of the page root directory.

Assets

All the files from the assets directory (and from the theme) are moved into the directory specified in the config, which is emptied before. This is a subdirectory of the output directory (defaults to assets).

Blades takes of the pages it rendered before and if some of them is deleted, the corresponding files in the output directory will be deleted, too. The other files in the output directory are left intact. This way, you can place anything in the output directory and (as long as its name differs from all the page names and it's not in the assets subdirectory), Blades won't touch it.

Meta

Blades renders sitemap (into sitemap.xml), Atom (into atom.xml) and RSS (into rss.xml) feeds, unless explicitly disabled in the config.

Contribution

If you found a bug or would like to see some feature in Blades, you are the most welcome to submit an issue or a pull request! Likewise if you found something in this documentation not clear or imprecise.

License

Blades is free software, and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3. See LICENSE.