realworld-ssg

The same static site, built with three different static site generators:

• Hugo — Go-based, the most popular SSG
• Saga — Swift-based, code-driven pipeline
• Publish — Swift-based, by John Sundell

Same content. Same URLs. Same output. Different tools.

This is the companion repo for my article on loopwerk.io.

The site

A minimal but realistic static site with:

• A home page with a link to the latest article
• A blog with 5 articles, paginated (2 per page), with tags and summaries
• Tag pages listing all articles for a given tag (e.g. /articles/tags/swift/)
• An Atom/RSS feed for the blog
• A projects page listing open source projects
• An about page
• Article URLs include the publication year: /articles/2024/my-post/
• A contact page, fully programmatically created (not from a markdown file).
• Cache-busting CSS filename.

No fancy CSS. No themes. Just semantic HTML — the focus is on the SSG mechanics.

Requirements

• just command runner
• Hugo (for the Hugo version)
• Swift 5.9+ (for Saga and Publish)

Usage

Build a single SSG:

cd hugo && just build
cd saga-ssg && just build
cd publish-ssg && just build

Build all:

just build-all

Clean all generated output:

just clean-all