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.
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.
npm install -g mikser
mikser
inside itvar 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();
mikser.js
and put these lines inside npm install mikser
node mikser
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.
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.
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.