Aphid

Aphid is a fast, opinionated static site generator built in Rust with first-class support for blogs, wikis, and standalone pages — all powered by Markdown files. It’s what builds this site.

Features

• Blog with tags, pagination, and RSS/Atom feeds
• Wiki pages with [[wiki-links]] that resolve across all content types
• Standalone pages for things like About or Contact
• Tera templates — swap the entire look by pointing theme_dir in aphid.toml
• Syntax highlighting with CSS-class-based token markup
• Mermaid diagrams rendered client-side
• GitHub-style alert blocks (note, tip, warning, caution)
• Table of contents generated from headings
• Draft flag to keep unpublished content out of builds
• Dev server with WebSocket hot-reload - blazing fast rebuilds

Content structure

content/
  home.md
  blog/
    2025-03-01_my-post.md
  wiki/
    some-topic.md
  pages/
    about.md

All content files use Markdown with YAML frontmatter. Wiki-links ([[slug]] or [[slug|Display text]]) resolve across blog, wiki, and pages by filename stem.

Installation

cargo install aphid --locked

CLI usage

aphid build              # render to dist/
aphid serve              # dev server on :3000 with live reload
aphid blog new "Title"   # scaffold a dated blog post
aphid wiki new "Title"   # scaffold a wiki page
aphid page new "Title"   # scaffold a standalone page

Performance

Built on Rayon and Tokio for multithreaded rendering. Incremental rebuilds during development are near-instant even on larger sites.

Links

• Documentation
• Source code