Swifty

Super Speedy Static Site Generator

Swifty uses convention over configuration to make it super simple to build blazingly fast static sites.

Features

• Markdown pages with YAML front matter
• Automatic image optimization to responsive WebP images with srcset
• HTML, CSS, and JS minification during production builds
• Layouts and partials for reusable templates
• Auto-injected CSS/JS from your css/ and js/ folders
• Code syntax highlighting via highlight.js
• Tags and navigation generated automatically
• RSS feed generation for blogs and content folders
• Draft mode for work-in-progress pages (visible in dev, hidden in production)
• Scheduled publishing via future dates in front matter
• Contact forms via third-party services (Formspree, Netlify Forms, etc.)
• Pagination for folders with many pages
• Data files - Load JSON/YAML data and use in templates
• Open Graph tags - Auto-generated social sharing meta tags
• 404 page convention - pages/404.md builds to dist/404.html
• Word count & reading time - Auto-calculated for blog posts
• Previous/next navigation - Auto-generated links between sibling pages
• Eta templating - Full JavaScript in templates with EJS syntax
• Idiomorph navigation with optional intent prefetching for SPA-like transitions
• Custom permalinks and base paths for flexible deployment URLs
• Public asset passthrough for files that should be copied unchanged

Requires Node.js 22 or newer. See Migrating to Swifty 4 when upgrading an existing site.

Quickstart

npm install -g @daz4126/swifty
swifty my-site
cd my-site
npx swifty start

Then visit http://localhost:3000

Project Structure

your-site/
├── pages/          # Markdown content (folder structure = URLs)
├── layouts/        # HTML layout templates
├── partials/       # Reusable content snippets
├── data/           # JSON/YAML data files
├── css/            # Stylesheets (auto-injected)
├── js/             # JavaScript (auto-injected)
├── images/         # Images (auto-optimized to responsive WebP)
├── public/         # Files copied unchanged to the output root
├── template.html   # Base HTML template
└── config.yaml     # Site configuration

Commands

npx swifty my-site          # Create new site in my-site/ folder
npx swifty build            # Build static site to dist/ (for production)
npx swifty start            # Build, watch, and serve at localhost:3000 (for development)
npx swifty build --out dir  # Build to custom output directory
npx swifty deploy "message" # Build, commit the output folder, and push

Development vs Production

• swifty start - For development. Includes live reload (auto-refreshes browser on file changes) and file watching with incremental builds for CSS/JS/images.
• swifty build - For production deployment. Produces clean output without any development scripts.
• swifty deploy "message" - Builds the site, commits only the generated output folder, and pushes it to git.

Documentation

See the full documentation for details on configuration, layouts, partials, and more.