Introduction

Welcome to Taxus, a Rust-based static site generator built with Tera, featuring WebAssembly “islands” for interactive components.

What is Taxus?

Taxus is a static site generator that combines:

• Tera templates for the static “sea of HTML” — page layout, content, navigation
• Markdown content with TOML frontmatter for writing pages and posts
• SCSS for modern styling
• TypeScript — optional type-checked browser modules compiled without Node.js or a package manager
• Yew components — pre-rendered server-side at build time, hydrated by WASM in the browser for interactivity

The key insight: pages are immediately visible with no JavaScript required. Interactive components load asynchronously and attach without re-rendering.

Features

• Static-first: Pre-rendered HTML for optimal performance and SEO
• Islands Architecture: Interactive Yew WASM components embedded within static pages
• TypeScript assets: Opt-in browser modules with source maps and serve-mode rebuilding
• Markdown Content: Write content in Markdown files with TOML frontmatter
• Syntax Highlighting: Tree-sitter based code highlighting (Rust, JavaScript, CSS and HTML built in)
• Co-located Assets: Images and files in the content directory are automatically copied to output
• Hero Images: Responsive variants, WebP conversion, and <picture>/srcset markup generated automatically
• Internal Links: Reference other pages by content file path with build-time validation
• Blog Features: Summary extraction, reading time, word count, custom slugs
• Pagination: Split large collections across multiple pages
• RSS/Atom Feeds: Automatic feed generation for content syndication
• Sitemap: Automatic sitemap.xml generation with priorities and lastmod dates
• Taxonomies: Tags, categories, and series for content organization
• Full-Text Search: TF-IDF search index searched client-side by the WASM client
• Development Server: Hot-reloading local server with WebSocket live reload
• CLI Interface: build, clean, init, routes, and serve subcommands

Who is this for?

Taxus is ideal for:

• Rust developers who want to build websites without leaving their favorite language
• Performance enthusiasts who want fast, optimized static sites with selective WASM interactivity
• Frontend developers who want typed browser behavior without adopting a JavaScript build toolchain
• SEO-conscious developers who need pre-rendered content with no JavaScript dependency for initial render
• Component lovers who prefer the Yew component model for interactive UI pieces

Documentation Overview

• Getting Started — Quick start guide
• Theory — How a build works: the Site Tree, identity, derivations, a worked example, the glossary, and the reasons behind the design
• Architecture — The crates, modules, and the build pipeline stage by stage
• Content Model — The content directory as a database: rows, parent pointers, indexes
• Configuration — site.toml format and options
• TypeScript Assets — typed browser modules without Node.js
• Content — Markdown files, frontmatter, taxonomies, pagination
• Templates — Tera templates and context variables
• Images — Hero image processing and responsive variants
• Syntax Highlighting — Tree-sitter highlighting setup
• Islands Architecture — How to write and use Yew components
• Search — Client-side full-text search
• Styling — SCSS stylesheets
• CLI Reference — Command-line interface documentation
• Development Server — Hot reload and file watching
• Development — Building, testing, and xtask workflows
• API Reference — Library API documentation

License

This project is dual-licensed under the MIT and Apache-2.0 licenses.