Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll (for a comprehensive list of SSGs, please see Jamstack). It is written in Rust and uses the Tera template engine, which is similar to Jinja2, Django templates, Liquid, and Twig.
Content is written in CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown. Zola uses pulldown-cmark to parse markdown files. The goal of this library is 100% compliance with the CommonMark spec. It adds a few additional features such as parsing footnotes, Github flavored tables, Github flavored task lists and strikethrough.
SSGs use dynamic templates to transform content into static HTML pages. Static sites are thus very fast and require no databases, making them easy to host. A comparison between static and dynamic sites, such as WordPress, Drupal, and Django, can be found here.
To get a taste of Zola, please see the quick overview below.
Unlike some SSGs, Zola makes no assumptions regarding the structure of your site. In this overview, we'll be making a simple blog site.
This overview is based on Zola 0.17.1.
Please see the detailed installation instructions for your platform. With Zola installed, let's initialize our site:
$ zola init myblog
You will be asked a few questions.
> What is the URL of your site? (https://example.com):
> Do you want to enable Sass compilation? [Y/n]:
> Do you want to enable syntax highlighting? [y/N]:
> Do you want to build a search index of the content? [y/N]:
For our blog, let's accept the default values (i.e., press Enter for each question). We now have a myblog directory with the following structure:
├── config.toml
├── content
├── sass
├── static
├── templates
└── themes
For reference, by the end of this overview, our myblog directory will have the following structure:
├── config.toml
├── content/
│ └── blog/
│ ├── _index.md
│ ├── first.md
│ └── second.md
├── sass/
├── static/
├── templates/
│ ├── base.html
│ ├── blog-page.html
│ ├── blog.html
│ └── index.html
└── themes/
Let's start the Zola development server within the newly created myblog directory:
$ cd myblog
$ zola serve
Building site...
Checking all internal links with anchors.
> Successfully checked 0 internal link(s) with anchors.
-> Creating 0 pages (0 orphan) and 0 sections
Done in 13ms.
Listening for changes in .../myblog/{config.toml,content,sass,static,templates}
Press Ctrl+C to stop
Web server is available at http://127.0.0.1:1111
If you point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:1111, you should see a "Welcome to Zola" message.
Let's make a home page. To do this, let's first create a base.html file inside the templates directory. This step will make more sense as we move through this overview.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>MyBlog</title>
</head>
<body>
<section class="section">
<div class="container">
{% block content %} {% endblock %}
</div>
</section>
</body>
</html>
Now, let's create an index.html file inside the templates directory.
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<h1 class="title">
This is my blog made with Zola.
</h1>
{% endblock content %}
This tells Zola that index.html extends our base.html file and replaces the block called "content" with the text between the {% block content %} and {% endblock content %} tags.
Now let's add some content. We'll start by making a blog subdirectory in the content directory and creating an _index.md file inside it. This file tells Zola that blog is a section, which is how content is categorized in Zola.
├── content
│ └── blog
│ └── _index.md
In the _index.md file, we'll set the following variables in TOML format:
+++
title = "List of blog posts"
sort_by = "date"
template = "blog.html"
page_template = "blog-page.html"
+++
Note that although no variables are mandatory, the opening and closing
+++are required.
blog.html in the templates directory as the template for listing the Markdown files in this section. blog-page.html in the templates directory as the template for individual Markdown files. For a full list of section variables, please see the section documentation. We will use title = "List of blog posts" in a template (see below).
Let's now create some more templates. In the templates directory, create a blog.html file with the following contents:
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<h1 class="title">
{{ section.title }}
</h1>
<ul>
<!-- If you are using pagination, section.pages will be empty. You need to use the paginator object -->
{% for page in section.pages %}
<li><a href="{{ page.permalink | safe }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endblock content %}
As done by index.html, blog.html extends base.html, but this time we want to list the blog posts. The title we set in the _index.md file above is available to us as {{ section.title }}. In the list below the title, we loop through all the pages in our section (blog directory) and output the page title and URL using {{ page.title }} and {{ page.permalink | safe }}, respectively. We use the | safe filter because the permalink doesn't need to be HTML escaped (escaping would cause / to render as /).
If you go to http://127.0.0.1:1111/blog/, you will see the section page for blog. The list is empty because we don't have any blog posts. Let's fix that now.
In the blog directory, create a file called first.md with the following contents:
+++
title = "My first post"
date = 2019-11-27
+++
This is my first blog post.
The title and date will be available to us in the blog-page.html template as {{ page.title }} and {{ page.date }}, respectively. All text below the closing +++ will be available to us as {{ page.content }}.
We now need to make the blog-page.html template. In the templates directory, create this file with the contents:
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<h1 class="title">
{{ page.title }}
</h1>
<p class="subtitle"><strong>{{ page.date }}</strong></p>
{{ page.content | safe }}
{% endblock content %}
Note the
| safefilter for{{ page.content }}.
This should start to look familiar. If you now go back to our blog list page at http://127.0.0.1:1111/blog/, you should see our lonely post. Let's add another. In the content/blog directory, let's create the file second.md with the contents:
+++
title = "My second post"
date = 2019-11-28
+++
This is my second blog post.
Back at http://127.0.0.1:1111/blog/, our second post shows up on top of the list because it's newer than the first post and we had set sort_by = "date" in our _index.md file. As a final step, let's modify our home page to link to our blog posts.
The index.html file inside the templates directory should be:
{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<h1 class="title">
This is my blog made with Zola.
</h1>
<p>Click <a href="{{ get_url(path='@/blog/_index.md') }}">here</a> to see my posts.</p>
{% endblock content %}
This has been a quick overview of Zola. You can now dive into the rest of the documentation.