remutils

litesite

Create and publish tiny static sites.

2026 Rémino Rem https://remino.net/

Installation

Homebrew

brew install remino/remino/litesite
litesite

Cargo

cargo install litesite
litesite

Git clone

git clone git@github.com:remino/remutils.git
cd remutils/litesite
./litesite

Usage

Run man litesite or litesite --help to see how to use it.

With no arguments, litesite prints the usage screen.

litesite serve now uses a Tornado-style logger prefix similar to python-livereload, including colored ANSI prefixes on terminals, and serves live reload over SSE. CSS changes hot-swap stylesheets in place, other watched file changes trigger a full page reload, and browser tabs reconnect across server restarts by comparing a boot id.

The command expects a site root with:

The site .env can disable build-time extras:

HTML files can include other files with SSI-style directives:

<!--#include file="relative/path/to/file" -->

The path is resolved relative to the file being processed. Relative paths, absolute paths, and paths outside the site root are all accepted.

Included .md and .markdown files are rendered to HTML. Markdown supports attributes (including classes and IDs), tables, fenced code blocks, definition lists, embedded HTML, and smart punctuation. New site scaffolds include a root-level priv/ directory for these reusable source files; its contents are not copied to dist/. The development server expands includes and watches the whole site root, so edits to a Markdown file update the page on reload.

ImageMagick is required only for AVIF derivative generation. rsdeploy is required only for litesite deploy.

litesite new <slug> creates ./<slug> by default. init remains available as an alias.

Scaffold templates

litesite new renders the bundled default Mustache template unless you choose another one with -t or --template:

litesite new -t portfolio my-site
litesite new --template ./templates/portfolio my-site

Template names resolve in this order: bundled templates, .litesite/templates/ or .config/litesite/templates/ in the current directory or a parent, then $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/litesite/templates/ (or $HOME/.config/litesite/templates/), then a relative or absolute directory path. Files ending in .mustache are rendered without that suffix. Paths can use [slug], matching comprose's path placeholder format. Templates receive default slug, year, and author values for Mustache rendering.

Pass additional string variables with a repeatable --var KEY=VALUE option or with --vars FILE.json. The JSON file must contain an object whose values are strings. Later options override earlier values:

litesite new -t portfolio --vars site.json --var title="My site" example

Those variables are available in Mustache content as {{title}} and in paths as [title]. Only slug is reserved. year defaults to the current year and author defaults to the local Git repository's author, then whoami, then Your Name; either may be overridden by template or command-line variables.

A template can also include a root .litesite.json with default string variables in its vars object. Its values are loaded before --vars and --var, so callers can override them. This metadata file is never copied into the generated site.

{ "vars": { "description": "A small site." } }

AVIF derivatives are written as sibling files:

"What about this feature?"

This is by no means a tool made to build a modern website with all the tree-shaking, auto-prefixing, pre-rendering, etc.

It's meant to be a simple tool that lets you write your own HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and stay out of your way, with no hand holding.

What it does help you with is to run the site locally with live reload, so you don't have to hit the Refresh button of your browser at every change, build the files with minification unless you disable it, automatically add Gzip, Brotli, and zstd derivates, as well as JPEG and WebP derivatives for AVIF image files, if you use those. Then, with rsdeploy, it will help you deploy the site.

That's it.

Development

bats tests

The package follows the same top-level convention as the other remutils tools, with a Rust implementation behind the executable shim:

Licence

See LICENSE.txt.