What is Yass?

Yass is an astonishingly un-opinionated static site generator. Your sites’s structure is entirely up to you: organize static assets, .html files, .md (Markdown) files, and .liquid (Liquid) templates however you want under site/. Liquid layouts and reusable templates are supported but optional.

The one opinion Yass holds is that you should decide everything. There’s zero configuration and no conventions to learn!

Getting started

Starting from a blank page isn’t fun, so yass init spits out the source to this very site to help get you started.

$ gem install yass
$ yass init blog
Creating blog/layouts/default.html.liquid
Creating blog/layouts/splash.html.liquid
Creating blog/site/assets/highlight.min.js
Creating blog/site/assets/highlightjs-atom-one-dark.min.css
Creating blog/site/assets/main.css.liquid
Creating blog/site/helpers/index.md.liquid
Creating blog/site/index.splash.md.liquid
Creating blog/site/layouts-templates/index.md.liquid
Creating blog/templates/asset_tags.liquid
Creating blog/templates/nav.liquid
$ cd blog

site/ contains your site’s source.
layouts/ contains Liquid layouts (optional).
templates/ contains reusable Liquid templates (optional).

Building

Build your site into the dist/ directory with yass build.

$ yass build

Previewing

To preview your site on your computer, simply open dist/index.html with your browser 🤯. (This requires using relative links, but there are helpers for that.)

If you’re building for webserverless, local viewing, and using the skip_index filter anywhere, use the --no-skip-index option.

$ yass build --no-skip-index

The watch command will continuously build as you make changes in site/, layouts/, and templates/.

$ yass watch # --no-skip-index works here too

Interested?

Keep reading about layouts, templates, and helpers, or check out the code on Github!