What are the best Ruby static site generators?

Question

3

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Considered

7

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Recs.

Sep 21, 2019

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

3 Options Considered

Best Ruby static site generators	Price	Language	License
-- Jekyll	-	Ruby	MIT
-- Middleman	-	Ruby	-
-- Octopress	-	Ruby	-

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score 4 · Answer 1

Jekyll

Top Pro

Supported by GitHub Pages

You can host your site with great stability and for free by using GitHub pages. See More

Top Con

Little Windows support

Windows is not an officially supported platform and setting it up on Windows requires a lot more tinkering than Linux or OSX. See More

Kamir's Experience

Easy to setup and lovely github support out of the box. See More

Specs

Language:Ruby

License:MIT

Template Engine:Liquid

Markup Languages:HTML, Markdown

Top Pro

Mix and match HTML and Markdown pages

You can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts. See More

Top Pro

Large, active and helpful community

Thanks to it's popularity, Jekyll has a large and active community of users. This means there is plenty of learning material available for Jekyll and it's easy to find help from other users when needed. See More

Top Pro

Has a built in server

You can spin up a static server at localhost:4000 by running jekyll serve. See More

Top Pro

Code highlighting with pygments

Jekyll has Pygments code highlighting built in so you can create syntax highlighted code blocks on your blog. See More

Top Pro

Supports adding additional Ruby Gems

You can add Ruby gems to your Gemfile to add extra features to your Jekyll blog. See More

Top Pro

Excels at blogging

Jekyll pages are organized by posts, which makes it easier to build a blog on it because it's already structured that way. See More

Top Pro

Has built in watch mode

Watch mode will reconstruct the site as pages are updated which is great for testing. See More

Top Pro

Decent documentation

Link to docs See More

Top Pro

GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain

You can host your site with great stability and Jekyll support out of the box for free by using GitHub pages. See More

Top Pro

Can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts

Top Pro

Import your existing blog from many sources

Jekyll supports importing from many dynamic blog engines: CSV Drupal 6 Drupal 7 Enki Google Reader Joomla Jrnl Marley Mephisto Movable Type Posterous RSS S9Y Textpattern Tumblr Typo WordPress WordPress.com See More

Top Pro

Customisable with data and collections

Can make sites very different from blogs but with a lot of pages by making templates using data and collections. See More

See All

score 2 · Answer 2

Middleman

Top Pro

Support for a variety of templating languages and preprocessors

Middleman supports lots of compiled languages, such as Less, Markdown, Textile, CoffeeScript, Stylus and more. See More

Top Con

A little more complicated than other static site generators

Middleman is a big piece of software, it's not simply a static blog generator. Because of all the functionality and flexibility it offers it can be a little more complex than other static site generators and a little harder to learn all of its bells and whistles. See More

Specs

Language:Ruby

Top Pro

Extensible and flexible

Middleman has a resources page full of official and community extensions. See More

Top Pro

Embraces Rails conventions

Middleman follows established conventions so if you know rails, you can easily pick up middleman. See More

Top Pro

Built in minification, compression, and cache busting

Minification and compression are as easy as setting a few configuration options, and unique asset hashes are available to allow you to invalidate the cache of files that change regularly. See More

See All

score 1 · Answer 3

Octopress

Top Pro

Uses Markdown for writing

Uses the Markdown syntax for writing blogs. See More

Top Con

Inefficient

Adding a new post, for example, causes the entire blog to be regenerated. See More

Specs

Language:Ruby

Top Pro

Lots of plugins (from Jekyll + 3rd party)

Another advantage of being based on Jekyll is default access to the extensive plugin system for Jekyll. There are also plugins developed specifically for Octopress. See More

Top Pro

Based on Jekyll

As Octopress is simply a framework on top of Jekyll, it benefits from being based on one of the most popular site generators available. The primary benefit is that it is backed by git and is built in such a way that the site can be easily re-generated if the content changes. See More

Top Pro

Very easy to use

Octopress is designed to remove all the time-consuming and frustrating tasks you usually have to deal with when using Jekyll. You don't have to write your own HTML templates or do any configuration to get started. The default template also takes care of any basic CSS/JS you need to write to get going. See More

See All

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What are the best Ruby static site generators?

3 Options Considered

Jekyll

My Recommendation for Jekyll

My Recommendation for Jekyll

Supported by GitHub Pages

Little Windows support

Mix and match HTML and Markdown pages

Large, active and helpful community

Has a built in server

Code highlighting with pygments

Supports adding additional Ruby Gems

Excels at blogging

Has built in watch mode

Decent documentation

GitHub Pages offers free hosting with a github.io subdomain

Can use HTML to set up your page templates, and markdown for your blog posts

Import your existing blog from many sources

Customisable with data and collections

Middleman

My Recommendation for Middleman

My Recommendation for Middleman

Support for a variety of templating languages and preprocessors

A little more complicated than other static site generators

Extensible and flexible

Embraces Rails conventions

Built in minification, compression, and cache busting

Octopress

My Recommendation for Octopress

My Recommendation for Octopress

Uses Markdown for writing

Inefficient

Lots of plugins (from Jekyll + 3rd party)

Based on Jekyll

Very easy to use

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