Pannonico is a static site generator I have been building around the way I actually want to work on static sites.
For many years I have been using Pannini static site builder from Zurb and their Foundation framework. I loved it for its simplicity and speed, and have been using it for more than 10 years until I finally decided to make a modern solution. Pannonico is written in Go and works with HTML or Markdown, layouts, partials and structured data. Vite is a first class citizen in Pannonico and can remain part of the same build when a project needs frontend assets, without turning the whole site into a JavaScript application. This gives you a very fast build for static pages and total freedom to build or use any kind of frontend framework, or even just plain ol' JS! :)
The CLI can be installed directly or used through npm. Pannonico also has an MCP server for AI-assisted development, plus a VS Code extension and language server for project-aware editor support.
The Free edition is already public, and I have been spending some time measuring and improving the build pipeline to produce as smooth experience as possible.
Attached table shows a preview from the current 10,000-page benchmark, measured in pages per second. Build process adapts to your hardware, so it will scale with its capabilities.
| Workload | Pannonico | Hugo | Eleventy |
|---|---|---|---|
| With templates | 2,045 | ||
| 1,874 | 1,189 | ||
| Templates + data | 1,689 | 1,897 | |
| 1,257 | |||
| Templates + data + Vite | 1,603 | ||
| — | — |
This is not an official launch since the project is still in beta, and a lot can change, but I want to showcase how far I've got.
Other interesting features this CLI tool possess:
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To be honest, someone told me that I can't do it, and I said - hold my beer. :)
I am a web developer for 25+ years, with focus on frontend, developer tooling and UI design. This is my serious take at AI assisted development. My intention is to keep developing this as long as I am able to work, to create a stable and "boring" software you can depend on, like I was able to depend on Panini, once upon a time.
If anyone from Zurb is reading this - thank you!