github.com/ralsina/nicolino
0.19.0 / published Jan 30, 2026 / repository
A good SSG written in Crystal
Nicolino
A good static site generator.
Features
- Markdown-based content - Write in markdown, get HTML
- Posts and pages - Blog posts with RSS feeds and static pages
- Taxonomies - Tags, categories, and custom classification systems
- Image galleries - Automatic thumbnails with lightbox
- Books - mdbook/gitbook-style documentation with hierarchical chapters, sidebar TOC, and navigation
- Search - Site search functionality
- Sitemap - Automatic XML sitemap generation
- Fast builds - Parallel, incremental builds via Croupier task system
WARNING
This project is still in development and may change suddenly in places like the configuration file format, but it is ready to start being used.
For more information, visit https://nicolino.ralsina.me
Building for Release (Static Binaries)
The project uses libvips for fast image processing, but libvips cannot be statically linked. To create static binaries, we use the -Dnovips flag which falls back to crimage (a pure-Crystal image library).
Important trade-offs:
- Non-release builds with crimage are very slow - image processing will take noticeably longer
- Release builds with crimage are somewhat faster - but still slower than libvips
- Static builds require
-Dnovips- otherwise linking will fail due to missing libvips static libraries
For development use, build without -Dnovips for fast image processing with libvips. For release/static builds, use -Dnovips and accept the performance trade-off.
API
- Archive
- Assets
- Base16
- Books
- Config
- Creatable
- DateUtils
Date parsing utilities
- FeatureTask
A Croupier::Task subclass that automatically tracks timing per feature
- FeatureTiming
- FolderIndexes
- Gallery
Create automatic image galleries
- HTML
Provides HTML escaping and unescaping methods.
- Handler
- HtmlFilters
Functions that take a Lexbor document and return a modified version To create a Lexbor document, use
Lexbor::Parser.new(html) - Image
- Images
- Import
Import module
- LinkChecker
Link checker for validating in-site links
- Listings
- Locale
- Markdown
- Nicolino
- Pages
- Pandoc
- Posts
- RSSFeed
- Render
- Sc
- Search
- Similarity
- Sitemap
- Taxonomies
- Templates
- Theme
- ThemeAssets
- Toc
- Utils