Parrot

A fast, minimal static site generator for Markdown blogs, written in Ruby.

Getting started · Documentation · Live demo · Report a bug

Parrot turns a folder of Markdown files into a fast, SEO-ready blog of plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no database, no JavaScript framework and no build pipeline to configure: write posts in Markdown, run one command, and upload the public/ folder to any static host.

deepsnapster.com is built with Parrot.

• Markdown-first writing — GitHub-flavoured Markdown via kramdown, with tables, footnotes, blockquotes and images.
• Code and math out of the box — syntax highlighting with Rouge and LaTeX rendered by MathJax.
• Generated index — the home page is built from your posts, newest first, with optional grouping by year or month and pagination.
• Categories and tags — a paginated page per category, a categories overview, and tags on every post.
• SEO built in — per-page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, Open Graph and Twitter cards, schema.org JSON-LD, sitemap.xml, robots.txt and an RSS feed.
• Light and dark theme — follows the system setting, with a toggle that remembers the reader's choice.
• Drafts — preview unpublished posts locally; they never reach the build.
• Live preview — parrot serve rebuilds only what changed when you save a file.

Parrot needs Ruby 3.2 or newer.

gem install prt                      # installs the `parrot` command

parrot new blog                      # scaffold a new blog
cd blog
parrot post --title "Hello world"    # create a post
parrot serve                         # preview at http://localhost:8000

When you're ready to publish:

parrot build                         # writes the site to ./public

Then upload the contents of public/ to GitHub Pages, Netlify, S3, nginx or any other static host. See Deployment for details.

Contributions are welcome — bug reports, documentation fixes and features alike. Please read the contributing guide before opening a pull request.

Parrot is released under the MIT License.