frozen_rails

frozen_rails turns a new Ruby on Rails project into a static site generator. It only does the initial setup for you and can be removed from your Gemfile afterwards. It is deliberately not architected as a new framework. You own the generated code.

It is available as a Ruby gem:

It is inspired by rails-static and built on top of Parklife . The core idea of “Parklife” is to produce a static site by crawling an arbitrary rack application.

I have previously used other static site generators like Hugo and Middleman. However, frozen_rails has replaced all other static site generators in my tech stack.

Repurposing Ruby on Rails as a static site generator has multiple advantages:

You can apply all of your Rails-knowledge to static sites. You don’t need another tool for a simpler project.
If you ever want to convert the static site to a regular Rails project, you only need to add the non-GET routes. All other parts of the app can stay.

Additionally, I never liked the idea of restricting myself to Markdown. Even for a static, read-only site I want to be able to edit and publish “structured data”. For that purpose, I built the companion project static_db that makes heavy use of Rails’ ActiveRecord.