Do you like the idea behind simple-site but absolutely refuse to build another JavaScript app? Well this static site generator is for you. It is built with:
It provides:
- Building static pages from markdown files
- Built-in RSS capabilities
- Generating nonsense output to serve to spammers
- Merging styles into a single
<style>tag (no external CSS) - A two-line Dockerfile for hosting with nginx
- Scripts for local development
- Scripts for deployment to fly.io
- JS if you want it (ugh)
This site is intended for blog sites, but it could be used for any static site if you feel so inclined.
Example site that uses Good Site
The premise of this site builder is you write static pages using templ in the /pkg/ui/pages directory. They can be static, include CSS, JS, whatever. See the "creating a page" section for more information. When you build the site, the templ files are built into index.html pages at the routes you determine. All the styles are bundled together, purged, minified, and included in the index.html files.
Run make or make help to view the available commands in the Makefile.
make devYour site will now be served at https://localhost:8080. The posts/ and pkg/ directories will be watched for changes. When changes happen the site will be rebuilt. Refresh your browser to see the changes.
make dockerYour site will now be served at https://localhost. The docker container is set up with a volume that points to your local /public directory. This way you can run the following command to develop your site and get automatic changes:
make watchEdit the config.yaml to your liking. There is a description of what each variable is for. If you prefer JSON use a config.json with the same schema. You can also override variables at runtime with a .env file or environment variables. See the .env.example for the variable values.
To create a page create a .templ file in the pkg/ui/pages directory by copying an existing file or starting from scratch. You can follow the templ guide for building out the page, but in order to get it to work with this static site generator it needs to implement the Page interface found in pkg/ui/pages/routes.go.
Once you have something that implements the Page interface, create an init function in your .templ file that calls the AddRoute function found in pkg/ui/pages/routes.go to wire the page up to the static generator for the specified route. Below you will find the most basic example of a .templ file:
package pages
import (
"context"
)
type MyPage struct{}
templ (h *MyPage) Render() {
<!DOCTYPE html><html><body>Hello World!</body></html>
}
func NewMyPage() *MyPage {
return &MyPage{}
}
func init() {
AddRoute("/my-page", func() Page {
return NewMyPage()
})
}There are two existing .templ files that are set up to show list pages and single pages for markdown files. They are listMarkdown.templ and markdown.templ. By default, these pages don't publish routes. You can use them to build your own pages for displaying lists/single Markdown files. There is an existing posts.go file that creates a blog list and single pages at the /posts root URL. The posts.go page does a few things:
- It calls the
markdownservice inpkg/servicesto find all the markdown files under the/posts/path within the root markdown directory. It supplies its own method for determining the post slug. By default, it uses/posts/<year>/<month>/<day>/<slug> - It takes the markdown files and converts them into
MarkdownPostobjects to be used with thelistMarkdownandmarkdowntempl components - It adds routes for the
listandsinglepost pages - It generates atom, RSS, and JSON feeds that include all the posts
You can use this component to spin up multiple feeds/list/single page combinations for the various content types you want to display.
The site is set up to make writing markdown as straightforward as possible while providing some utility if things get screwed up. Don't worry about any meta/front matter to start, just create a .md file in the appropriate directory (e.g. markdown/posts/hello.md) and write some text. Here's an example:
# Hello world
Test post, please ignoreWhen you build the site, the markdown file will be edited with metadata based on the h1 tag (i.e. "# Hello World"), the first paragraph, and the site configuration:
\---
title: "Hello World"
slug: "hello-world"
author: "Author McAuthorson"
description: "Test post, please ignore."
created_date: "2025-01-07T12:41:04-08:00"
updated_date: "2025-01-27T12:41:04-08:00"
\---
# Hello World
Test post, please ignore.You can of course edit this stuff or add it in the beginning to override the defaults.
The pkg/ui/components directory contains a few components for helping you build your site. The main one is the layout.templ component. You can use it to scaffold all the doctype, html, head, and body stuff that you don't want to write for every page. You can see an example of how to call it in any of the template pages.
This site is a static site, so it can be deployed almost anywhere. Included is a fly.toml that you can use to deploy to fly.io. Use the make deploy and make deploy-remote commands to handle deployment. The make deploy command will build the docker image locally and push it to registry.fly.io. Then it will call the fly CLI to deploy. This saves you from having to build in the cloud using fly's build tools. You can still use the cloud build with the make deploy-remote script.
This site comes bundled with the ability to serve nonsense pages to spammers, bots, etc. (you know the culprits). It's up to you to use this and determine who you want to serve the nonsense to. The nonsense is generated using a Markov-chain trained on your own public/ HTML files. You can adjust this in cmd/nonsense/main.go if you like. By default, 20% of all the text on your site will be converted to nonsense. You can configure this by looking at the build-nonsense task in the Makefile. The nginx.conf has an existing rule for serving the nonsense as a baseline. Edit it for your own needs.