We DIY types do love our tiny scripts, frameworks, and CMSs, sometimes. There’s something about starting from near-scratch, with some of the annoying stuff taken out of the equation, that feels amazing. There’s so much potential on that blank screen, or in that empty text file.
Today, I’m talking about cory, which bills itself as a “tiny generator for static sites”. It’s Node-based, and it lives up to this promise. The source code for the whole thing, when zipped, weighs in at just 235KB.
Now, static site generators are usually small by nature. There’s no GUI (even though I’d really like one sometimes), usually not many dependencies. However, with new features being added all the time, extensions being developed, and communities forming, the “big names” are getting bigger code-bases. That’s why it’s always fun to check out the newer, smaller ones.
In cory’s case, the creator means business. The default template is spectacularly minimal. The default Sass file contains only the most minimal styles, so you can just delete them and start over. There are only just enough “pages” (all two of them) to show you how the file structure of the whole thing is supposed to work.
Features are limited to:
- compiling the layouts, content, and styles (which are built with handlebars, Markdown, and Sass, respectively),
- serving the files to HTTP, presumably for testing,
- deploying the site to GitHub Pages
And that’s it! Anything else is up to you, and presumably pretty easy to add, if you know how to work with NodeJS
