About StaticWGen

StaticWGen is a static website generator built entirely on the .NET stack. It was created to prove that you don't need a JavaScript toolchain to build modern, feature-rich static websites.

Architecture

The build pipeline is orchestrated by NUKE and follows a clear, composable design:

flowchart TB
    subgraph Input
        MD[Markdown + YAML Front Matter]
        TPL[Scriban Template]
        ASSETS[CSS / JS / Images]
    end
    subgraph Pipeline
        PARSE[Parse & Extract Metadata]
        FILTER[Filter: Draft / Scheduled / Archived]
        RENDER[Render HTML via Scriban]
        TAGS[Generate Tag Pages]
        BLOG[Generate Blog Index]
        SEARCH[Build Search Index]
        SEO[Sitemap + Robots + Feed]
    end
    subgraph Output
        HTML[Static HTML Files]
        JSON[search-index.json]
        XML[sitemap.xml + feed.xml]
    end
    MD --> PARSE --> FILTER --> RENDER --> HTML
    TPL --> RENDER
    ASSETS --> HTML
    RENDER --> TAGS --> HTML
    RENDER --> BLOG --> HTML
    RENDER --> SEARCH --> JSON
    RENDER --> SEO --> XML

The Build System

Each step in the pipeline is a composable NUKE interface. This means you can extend or override any part independently:

// Each pipeline step is a composable interface
public interface IGenerateWebsite : INukeBuild
{
    Target GenerateHtml => _ => _
        .Executes(() =>
        {
            // Parse Markdown, apply templates, write HTML
        });
}

public interface IGenerateTagPages : INukeBuild
{
    Target GenerateTagPages => _ => _
        .TriggeredBy<IGenerateWebsite>(x => x.GenerateHtml)
        .Executes(() =>
        {
            // Extract tags, generate per-tag pages
        });
}

Markdown Extensions

StaticWGen uses Markdig with a carefully chosen set of extensions:

• YAML Front Matter — title, description, author, date, tags, and custom metadata
• Syntax Highlighting — 200+ languages powered by Prism.js
• Mermaid Diagrams — flowcharts, sequence diagrams, state machines, and more
• LaTeX Mathematics — both inline ( E = mc^2 ) and display mode
• Emoji — write :rocket: and get 🚀
• SmartyPants — proper typographic quotes and dashes
• Tables, Footnotes, Task Lists — all the essentials

Content Lifecycle

Every piece of content goes through a lifecycle:

SEO & Discoverability

Generated pages include everything modern search engines expect:

• Canonical URLs and Open Graph metadata
• Twitter Card tags for rich social previews
• JSON-LD structured data (Article / BlogPosting schema)
• XML Sitemap for crawlers
• Atom feed for RSS readers
• Hreflang links for multilingual content

Philosophy

1. Content first — Markdown is the source of truth
2. No magic — every build step is explicit C# code
3. Minimal dependencies — Pico CSS + vanilla JS, no frameworks
4. Deploy anywhere — Docker, GitHub Pages, S3, or cp -r output/ /var/www