Gustwind is an experimental site generator built on top of JSON definitions using Deno, Twind, and Sidewind. The goal of the design is to allow component oriented development of large scale sites (more than thousands of pages). Conceptually it's split as follows:

  • Development mode lets you preview the site and modify page definitions to commit later
  • Production mode generates pure static HTML with CSS inlined to the files
  • Components defined with a JSON based component abstraction included allow you to extract shared markup and bind data to it
  • Data sources define how your data is fetched. At page level, it can then be connected and bound to components
  • Transforms let you alter data to fit the current need. You can use them for example convert Markdown input to HTML or reverse the order of an array to generate a blog index in a specific order.
  • Pages based on the JSON page definitions describe the site and use the concepts above to compose your site

Please see the documentation to learn more about the concepts.

Further development to be done

  • Mark components without data dependencies as pure to allow memoization for faster compilation
  • Set up a JSON schema to define components and pages to allow validation
  • Add a component explorer to allow defining components through the development mode
  • Implement an incremental compiler to detect changes and compile only what has changed instead of compiling the whole site
  • Cache markdown and leverage Netlify caching to avoid compilation

Notes

The project needs Deno 1.15.1 or newer to run! I recommend using a tool like dvm for managing the version.

  • Tailspin was an experimental site generator built with partially the same technology. In this project, the ideas have been largely re-implemented and taken further. In some ways Tailspin went further, though, as it implemented component level introspection (types) and editors while allowing JSX syntax.
  • Antwar was a React based static site generator. The experiences with Antwar over years have been put to good use in this project.

Usage

Run the available commands through velociraptor (vr).