Nēnē: A no-frills static site generator

Static website generators seem to be the favourite pass time of developers procrastinating on other more important projects. So of course, I wanted to try making my own!

Nēnē continues the long tradition of naming static site generators built in Python after birds (the nēnē is a goose endemic to Hawai'i).

Why build another one?

Mostly because I wanted to experiment with building command-line programs with click and Rich. But I also wanted something:

• No-frills: I don't want fancy built-in templates, blogging frameworks, etc. I'm mostly rolling my own templates.
• Templates have access to the entire content: Not all generators allow any page to have access to the entire website content. Yes this can cause problems with memory, but memory is cheap and I need this feature.
• Allows templates in Markdown: Using templating constructs in Markdown source files is extremely useful. I've only ever seen this in Urubu.
• Reads data from non-Markdown sources: Most generators only allow data to come into templates from Markdown source files. But sometimes data for building a page would be more natural coming from JSON/YAML/etc. Eleventy has this concept and I want to use it without figuring out how to setup Nodejs.

So I figured that it couldn't be that hard to build something with modern Python tools that had all of these things. And for once it actually wasn't!

Installing

Nēnē is available from PyPI and can be installed with pip:

python -m pip install nene

A conda-forge package may come in the future (or maybe not).

Documentation

Currently being created with Nēnē itself to prove I'm not a hypocrite.

License

Nēnē is free and open-source software distributed under the MIT License.