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.

Usage

The easiest way to consume the project is to use the CLI:

deno install -A --unstable --no-check -f https://deno.land/x/gustwind/cli.ts

The APIs are also available as modules if you need more control.

It’s a good idea to use a recent version of Deno and I recommend using 1.16.0 or newer.

Data flow

Gustwind accepts TypeScript, Markdown, JSON definitions including Twind (Tailwind) classes and emits HTML and JavaScript.

It’s possible to customize the input formats and it can load data from asynchronous sources, say GraphQL APIs, so it can be used with headless content APIs.

Earlier related work

• 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.

Development

Run the available commands through velociraptor (vr).

Publishing goes through the publish utility.

To test the cli locally, use deno install --no-check -A -f --unstable -n gustwind ./cli.ts. A symlink would likely work as well.