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  1. Stackups
  2. Application & Data
  3. Frameworks
  4. Static Site Generators
  5. Hakyll vs Metalsmith

Hakyll vs Metalsmith

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Metalsmith
Metalsmith
Stacks53
Followers66
Votes19
Hakyll
Hakyll
Stacks5
Followers5
Votes0
GitHub Stars2.8K
Forks417

Metalsmith vs Hakyll: What are the differences?

What is Metalsmith? An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator. In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

What is Hakyll? A haskell library for generating static sites, mostly aimed at small-to-medium sites and personal blogs. It provides you with the tools to create a simple or advanced static website using a Haskell DSL and formats such as markdown or RST.

Metalsmith and Hakyll can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.

Some of the features offered by Metalsmith are:

  • Read template files from a directory
  • Parse files for template placeholders
  • Prompt user to fill in each placeholder

On the other hand, Hakyll provides the following key features:

  • Post body (i.e. excluding post metadata) is read
  • Result is passed to an abbreviation substitution filter
  • Result is passed to my custom Pandoc compiler

Metalsmith and Hakyll are both open source tools. It seems that Metalsmith with 7.31K GitHub stars and 646 forks on GitHub has more adoption than Hakyll with 2.01K GitHub stars and 345 GitHub forks.

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Detailed Comparison

Metalsmith
Metalsmith
Hakyll
Hakyll

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.

It provides you with the tools to create a simple or advanced static website using a Haskell DSL and formats such as markdown or RST.

Read template files from a directory;Parse files for template placeholders;Prompt user to fill in each placeholder;Render files with aytemplating engine;Write filled-in files to a new directory
Post body (i.e. excluding post metadata) is read; Result is passed to an abbreviation substitution filter; Result is passed to my custom Pandoc compiler; Result is embedded into a post template with a so called “post context”; Result is embedded into the page layout.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
2.8K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
417
Stacks
53
Stacks
5
Followers
66
Followers
5
Votes
19
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 9
    Plugability
  • 4
    Easy to install, easy to hack, easy to deploy
  • 2
    Really works hard to be simple
  • 1
    Chain plugins like a file processing pipe
  • 1
    CI: push to github, auto-deploy to netlifly (free)
No community feedback yet
Integrations
No integrations available
GitLab Pages
GitLab Pages
DatoCMS
DatoCMS
WordPress
WordPress
Golang
Golang
Buddy
Buddy
Pandoc
Pandoc
Markdown
Markdown

What are some alternatives to Metalsmith, Hakyll?

Jekyll

Jekyll

Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.

Hugo

Hugo

Hugo is a static site generator written in Go. It is optimized for speed, easy use and configurability. Hugo takes a directory with content and templates and renders them into a full html website. Hugo makes use of markdown files with front matter for meta data.

Gatsby

Gatsby

Gatsby lets you build blazing fast sites with your data, whatever the source. Liberate your sites from legacy CMSs and fly into the future.

Hexo

Hexo

Hexo is a fast, simple and powerful blog framework. It parses your posts with Markdown or other render engine and generates static files with the beautiful theme. All of these just take seconds.

Middleman

Middleman

Middleman is a command-line tool for creating static websites using all the shortcuts and tools of the modern web development environment.

Gridsome

Gridsome

Build websites using latest web tech tools that developers love - Vue.js, GraphQL and Webpack. Get hot-reloading and all the power of Node.js. Gridsome makes building websites fun again.

Pelican

Pelican

Pelican is a static site generator that supports Markdown and reST syntax. Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) in reStructuredText or Markdown.

DocPad

DocPad

Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before.

11ty

11ty

A simpler static site generator. An alternative to Jekyll. Written in JavaScript. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML. Works with HTML, Markdown, Liquid, Nunjucks, Handlebars, Mustache, EJS, Haml, Pug, and JavaScript Template Literals.

MkDocs

MkDocs

It builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. There's a stack of good looking themes available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes.

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