alt Hacker NewsNixtml: Static website and blog generator written in Nix
Comments
I may be an unreasonable outlier, but I absolutely refuse to learn a complex config language.
YAML/TOML? These are the maximum of punishment I'm willing to deal with, as they are quite universal and useful in many situations.
If you need a complex touring complete config, you better use a reasonably popular general purpose language, or I'm not touching it.
Cool.
After using Nix for a while I got pretty fed up with the (subjective) unintuitiveness of the language†. It wasn't even that I thought it was a bad language, I just couldn't het it to click (and doubly so after the advent of flakes).
All the same it seems to me like if you grok it it's a great fit for constructing recipes for building things reliably that are part of huge dependency trees, and so it's natural that it would be a good website generator too.
† Luckily others shared this issue, and the result was Guix which solves that problem while introducing its own.
Using Nix for templating is wild but makes sense - you get reproducible builds, type checking, and function composition for free. The trade-off is portability and designer accessibility. Interesting niche: technical personal blogs where infrastructure-as-code mindset extends to content generation.
There's a more cursed one here: https://rgbcu.be/blog/htmnix. It hijacks the Nix search paths syntax (e.g. import <path> {}) to create html tags.
neat! I've been moving my site over to heavily use emacs/org for the authoring format and nix for the tooling infrastructure. I'll keep this in mind as a possible tool to help; I don't precisely know what I may still need to do that won't be easily doable with emacs.
I don't want to shit on this project, because that's not my intent. My biggest gripe with static site generators in general is that for some reason they require the author to write their pages in something other than plain HTML. It's literally a machine-readable format and yet they all want to mix json, yaml, or something with markdown. And "but the output html would overwrite the input html" isn't really an excuse since they all tend to output to a build directory.
And before someone says, "well you can work on your dream static site generator yourself", rest assured, I am, but I'm also very lazy and usually stop once it gets to a "good enough" state for my own use, but isn't quite ready to share with others.
As a nix person, I like this a lot and could see myself using it. My only criticism would be I don't love this kind of thing:
I understand that this is very flexible and powerful, but it immediately makes the templates highly non-portable and requiring of hand-authorship— fine for a personal blog by a code nerd, but a non-starter for when a designer is involved who will want to use visual tools. I see that right below that there's also a "normal string templating" option that's closer to conventional jinja2 or the like, but it's ultimately still pretty nix-ified.It might be worth some ifd [1] to allow a step that pre-processes conventional html + tags template files into the form that can be consumed by nixtml.
[1]: or the still-experimental dynamic derivations: https://fzakaria.com/2025/03/10/an-early-look-at-nix-dynamic...