Neato

Neato is a fast and fun static site generator (SSG) written in PHP.

First Thing’s First

This is a super-duper alpha version of Neato. It is rough and extremely incomplete. This has not been tested beyond my own specific (and narrow) use cases. It will probably not do what you want it to do at this point, but it’ll get there (open an issue and let me know if you run into any problems).

Requirements

• PHP 8.5 (I’ve only tested Neato with PHP 8.5 so far)
• php-yaml

Usage

The easiest way to try Neato is to build the tiny demo site.

1. Clone this repo somewhere on your computer or server.
2. Open the repo folder, and move neato.php and neato.yaml into the demo-site folder.
3. Open a terminal window, cd to the demo-site folder, and run php -f neato.php.

That’s it. Neato will run, and you’ll see the published site in the published folder.

If you want to try to build a real site, you can copy your content into the content folder, and open neato.yaml to configure Neato.

Power-Ups

If you want to experiment with Power-Ups, you can create a power-ups folder in your demo-site folder, and then move the atom and parsedown folders from the repo’s power-ups folder into that. (I wouldn’t suggest moving bunny or font-awesome just yet, as they require additional configuration and Neato will throw errors until you do that). But with the Atom and Parsedown Power-Ups in place, you can use Markdown within the files in content, and you’ll also get a nice Atom feed generated for your site the next time you run php -f neato.php.

Documentation

Thorough documentation on the Neato parser, tag functions, variables, and Power-Ups will soon be available at www.neato.pub.