About Super-Simple Includes

What is Super-Simple Includes?

Super-Simple Includes is a static site generator designed with simplicity at its core. It takes a different approach from complex frameworks by focusing on a single task: combining content fragments into complete HTML pages.

Key Principles

Simplicity first — One-pass processing with no recursion or complex dependencies
Content/design separation — Keep your words in text files and your design in HTML
Fast and portable — Ships as a standalone Rust binary with no runtime dependencies
Predictable — Linear processing means no surprises or circular reference issues
Secure — Built-in path traversal protection and safe content handling

How It Works

Define your pipeline in ssi-config.toml
Create content in separate files (texts, blocks, markdown)
Build your site with a single command
Deploy anywhere — it’s just static HTML

Generative AI Experiment

Super-Simple Includes is also an experiment in generative AI coding. This project explores what happens when AI systems design, implement, test, and document software from scratch. That experimental nature explains some unusual decisions — like the initial dual Python/Rust implementation experiment (now concluded with Rust as the sole implementation), or the extensive focus on testing and documentation.

This is also intended to be a real tool that can be used and relied upon, within the reasonable bounds of “you get what you paid for” and similar disclaimers.

Project Status

This project is under active development. While it works for real use cases and includes parallel Python and Rust test coverage, it may not have all the features of more established static site generators. The focus is on doing a few things effectively rather than adding many features.

Open Source

The code, tests, and documentation are generated by large language model AI and shared freely. See the AI License page for details about the licensing approach for machine-generated content.

Contributing

See the CONTRIBUTING.md file for details on how to contribute to the project.