Installation

You generally install using a package manager, but in some cases you cut and paste.

Packages to create static sites usually depend on many other packages, as most software does. In the case of the ones in this comparison, there are surprisingly small dependency trees.

For example, although Hugo is designed in Go, using it does not require the Golang development environment. The same goes for Pelican and Jekyll – though Pelican needs the runtime that is usually on your system.

MkPage depends on Pandoc, it is in fact a front-end of sorts to Pandoc. Staticsite uses several Python libraries to perform its tasks. These two have a very simple install; for MkPage you can just copy the binaries and add them to your PATH variable. Staticsite comes as an apt package for Ubuntu users.

Hugo, Pelican and Jekyll have apt packages available. Apart from installing using your package manager, Jekyll also has extensions and even themes available this way. For all the other packages, you must install extensions and themes only from the web. Pelican has a big GitHub repository that you can use.

As for MkPage, it uses the Go template engine, like Hugo. For this reason, it should not be an immense challenge to use Hugo themes for MkPage. To install this package, you unpack a ZIP file and add it somewhere in your path. It also comes as a Go get package for you Golang enthusiasts (Mihalis!–Ed) out there.

When installing from the source, you can find these packages on different Git repositories and GitHub has most of them. Starting with MkPage, you run a regular make sequence to install the package. It’s Go-based, so make sure you have those libraries.

There are also two source trees, the second one for resources where you can hold themes and templates.

As with MkPage, Hugo needs the Golang development environment. Experienced users will use the same method as with any other Go language projects.

Jekyll needs a Ruby dev environment, including the gem binary and the GCC, Make duo. Run it as you would any other Ruby development project. Finally, Pelican needs Python and a host of HTML libraries, the main one being Jinja2.

The staticsite project is completely Python-based, which makes it simple to use and change if you already have Python set up on your machine.

Installing staticsite is all good and well, but you may need to copy some files and directories to make a site build. It is more complicated than the other software.