verless / Verless

A simple and lightweight Static Site Generator.

verless (pronounced like serverless) is a Static Site Generator designed for Markdown-based content with a focus on simplicity and performance. It reads your Markdown files, applies your HTML templates and renders them as a website.

Features

• Flexible theming: Themes define the HTML templates as well as styles and scripts for your frontend. Initializing a new theme can be done within a single command, and setting it as active requires a single line of configuration. Since verless provides pre-defined template variables, themes are interchangeable.

• Rapid development: Just like themes, new projects can be created using a single command. Local development requires no third-party webserver as verless comes with a built-in webserver and rebuilds your project when something changes.

• High performance: Generating a static site typically is a matter of milliseconds. To keep build times short, verless lets you choose and explicitly enable features you need - only generate RSS feeds or overview pages for tags if you want to.

• Focus on simplicity: Global information, page types, plugins and other settings are configured in a central configuration file inside your project. We try to keep things small and simple, and if your project isn't simple, verless probably isn't a good fit.

Examples

• Example project structure: example/
• Real-world example website: dominikbraun.io

Installation

Linux and macOS

Download the latest release for your platform. Extract the downloaded binary into a directory like /usr/local/bin. Make sure the directory is in PATH.

Windows

Download the latest release, create a directory like C:\Program Files\verless and extract the executable into that directory. Add the directory to Path.

Docker

Assuming your project directory is my-blog, the following command builds your website:

$ docker container run -v $(pwd)/my-blog:/project verless/verless

The container will build the project mounted at /project and you'll find the website in my-blog/target. To run another command, just append it to the image name:

$ docker container run verless/verless version

Getting started

The easiest way to create a new project is to use the verless CLI:

$ verless create project my-blog

This initializes a project called my-blog inside a new directory, containing a small default site. You can either build the project or serve the static site directly:

$ verless serve -w my-blog

After running the command, you can view your new project under localhost:8080. Building the project works similary and generates a deployable website:

$ verless build my-blog

By default, verless generates the website into my-blog/target. You are now ready to create your first blog post!

Documentation

To find out how a verless project is structured, take a look at the example project. For a detailed reference, check out the documentation.

🔥 New tutorial: Create a website using verless

Contributing

Anyone is welcome to contribute to verless. Please refer to our contribution guidelines.