Baja NPM | npm.io

Baja

Baja is a really simple static site generator. "Really simple" of course means "not hard to use," but also "not hard to update, maintain, or deploy." It eschews a lot of functionality (and use cases) that more sophisticated SSGs offer, in exchange for an authoring experience that puts a lot of the fun back in building small, simple websites.

Why?

Modern web tools can do a lot of things. Hundreds of frameworks, components, and libraries exist to build complex applications and make sophisticated experiences possible.

But you know what's also cool? Good ol' HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And for many, many websites, that's all you really need. But it's surprisingly difficult to find site builders that aren't part of an expensive platform (e.g. Squarespace, Wix), or don't introduce tons of cumbersome dependencies and build steps.

Enter Baja. Baja's focus is on simplicity and maintainability: you create pages by editing HTML and Markdown, with some simple templating hooks available for variables, includes, conditionals, and simple queries. Baja's one configurable dependency — Webpack — is only necessary if you want to write Sass or transpile JavaScript, and is easy to turn off. And the build step generates regular HTML files, not heavy JavaScript bundles.