mikser

v7.12.10

Published

2 years ago

Real-time static site generator

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Mikser is a real-time static site generator

Mikser is designed for rapid web site development. It works equally well for small web sites and for large multi domain, multi language sites with thousands of pages and very complex generation logic.

Multi-threaded cluster rendering with incredible performance
LiveReload with real-time preview no matter if the web site has 10 or 10'000 pages
Built-in multi-language and multi-domain support
Pin-point diagnostics that provide accurate error messages
Easy integration with build systems like Grunt and Gulp, CSS pre-processors like Less and Sass or compilators like Browserify, Babel, CoffeeScript, TypeScript or any onther tool that has CLI
Support for most of the popular template and markup engines - Pug aka Jade, Eco, Ect, Ejs, Swig, Nunjucks, Twig, Markdown, Textile, YAML, TOML, ArchieML, CSON, JSON5, support for new engines through plug-ins
Very easy plug-in system with straight forward interface and hot reload

Installation

Mikser works well on Windows, Linux and OSX. It can be installed both globally and as a local dependency. It comes with all contrib plugins build-in.

Node.js ≥ 4.0
MongoDB ≥ 2.4

Using mikser as a command line tool

Install Mikser with npm install -g mikser
Create a folder for your project, run mikser inside it

Using mikser from inside a script

var mikser = require('mikser');
var express = require('express');
var cookieParser = require('cookie-parser');
var app = express();
app.use(cookieParser());
mikser({
	workingFolder: '/var/mikser', // Use custom working folder
	app: app, // Use existing Express web server, Default: Mikser will create one
	server: true, // Add Mikser middle-ware. Default: true, if set to false Mikser won't start web server
	watch: false, // Don't watch file system for changes. Default: true
	debug: true, // Enter debug mode. Default: false
	environment: 'dev' // Merge some extra configuration from another config file.
}).run();

Create mikser.js and put these lines inside
Install mikser as local dependency with npm install mikser
Start your first Mikser app with node mikser

First run

After you run Mikser for the first time it will create all the necessary folders inside your project folder and then start watching for changes and auto-generate your web site.

Performance

We have have tried many static site generators, they work well for simple web sites, but in real-life scenarios they degrade performance very fast. Here is what we have found, playing around with some of them.

For a simple web site with around 200 pages DocPad takes about 1 minute, Hexo takes 2 minutes and Mikser takes 6 seconds. For a complex web site with 1000 pages and templates that use blocks and partials, Mikser takes about 20 seconds while DocPad and Hexo take almost 30 minutes. We haven't tried Hugo with the same sites, because it lacks plug-ins and it was very hard to extend and reuse existing templates. From the basic web sites we have implemented with it, we found that it has almost the same performance as Mikser, but when the complexity of the generation logic raises it is much slower.

All static site generators that we have tested perform a full regeneration on every run. Mikser has build-in change tracking and only generates the pages that have been affected by the change. Most of the time Mikser is ready for less than 3 seconds, when DocPad and Hexo take 30 minutes to finish.

Examples

You can check one of our projects Dialog. It has simple structure with four languages in different domains. The project was originally implemented with DocPad. It took us 3 days to convert it to Mikser and we managed to reuse most of the templates with minor changes.

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