Overview

Uriel is a minimalistic, stable, feature complete static site generator, written in Python.

Named for the archangel Uriel in the novel Unsong, whose job was to perform the fantastic and mundane work necessary to keep the world functioning.

Built to last for years without requiring any maintenance. It is feature complete, and only depends on Python, with no third-party module dependencies. That means that it won't break unexpectedly years from now, after you've built a site around it.

As long as you can still get a working copy of python3, your site will still build the same way in the future.

Features

• Generates a static website you can host on pretty much any web server
• Minimalistic philosophy and approach
• Useful error messages
• Built-in tag index system
• Built-in breadcrumb navigation support
• Flat URL support to make some or all content nodes top-level URLs
• Inheritance and override system for content node settings and values
• Optional dynamic naming of static files (to force browser cache misses for CSS and JavaScript files when content changes)
• RSS feed generator, with ability to include or exclude content nodes from feed
• sitemap.xml generator, with ability to include or exclude content nodes from sitemap
• Minimalistic robots.txt generator
• Ability to include unmodified static files
• Ability to selectively override dynamically generated files with static files when necessary
• Simple but flexible templating system
• Supports a variety of useful built-in node/template replacement parameters
• Supports arbitrary user-defined Python code in node/template replacement parameters
• Supports arbitrary user-defined Python code in lifecycle handlers during generation
• Ability to generate static pages dynamically from user-defined Python code
• Implemented in pure Python 3, using only the built-in library modules
• Stable platform to build on
• Feature complete
• Minimal dependencies, pure Python 3 with no third-party modules
• GPL version 3 license

Why another static site generator? Why this one? Because I wanted an extremely stable platform to build my own web sites on, that I would be able to maintain and understand many years into the future. For this project, simplicity and stability is prioritized over new features.

This documentation site is built with Uriel (along with various local Soju extensions.

If you prefer something with a maximal feature set, and all the latest features, this probably won't be for you.

On the other hand, this system is so simple that it will pretty much keep working indefinitely, without any ongoing maintenance. For me, this is the main appeal.

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