Lists of tools for building websites, including static websites and docs sites.

Resources

Static site generators

Hugo

Jekyll

See also my resources for Jekyll - link.

Gatsby

Hydrogen

Next

Nuxt

Hexo

Documentation site builders

VuePress

  • Official site
  • SPA (Single Page Application). Therefore movement between pages is seamless. But this is still a static site - “During the build, we create a server-rendered version of the app and render the corresponding HTML by virtually visiting each route”. That was inspired by Nuxt and Gatsby which do something similar.
  • Built on VueJS.
  • Ideal for documentation sites.
    • It has a “default theme optimized for writing technical documentation”.
    • This works well for docs of existing Vue sites.
    • Format with markdown.
    • Great for mixing in dynamic content with the statically-rendered content.
  • VuePress examples
  • VuePress introduction

Docsify

  • Official site
  • SPA (Single Page Application) - uses a single HTML file (index.html) and uses markdown files to add content to virtual paths.
  • Built on VueJS.
  • Format with markdown.
  • Turn your existing docs folder into a docs site. I wrote a tutorial for this here.

Docute

  • Official site

  • “Docute is basically a JavaScript file that fetches Markdown files and renders them as a single-page application”.

Read The Docs

  • Official homepage
  • Built on Sphinx (a Python library).
  • Format with reStructuredText or Markdown.
  • Host on the Read the Docs site. This seems a like a common place for libraries to host their documentation, especially if they are Python libraries. Or self-host e.g. on GitHub Pages.
  • Build from /docs directory.

  • “Read the Docs simplifies software documentation by automating building, versioning, and hosting of your docs for you.”

GitBook

  • Official site
  • Format with markdown.
  • Great if you don’t want to write any code, but limited on number of public and private sites on the free plan.
  • Can sync to GitHub repo.