Static site generator

SSGs typically consist of a template written in HTML with a templating system, such as Liquid (Jekyll) or Go template (Hugo). The same structure (typically a Git repository) includes content in a plain-text format such as Markdown or reStructuredText, or in a structural meta format such as JSON or XML. A single plain-text file may correspond to a single web page. Alternatively, a single structural metadata file may correspond to an entire website if a single-page application framework like AngularJS is used. The website variable settings are stored in a plaintext configuration file _config.yml (YAML), _config.toml (TOML) or _config.json (JSON). Page files typically also start with a YAML, TOML, or JSON preamble to define variables such as title, permalink, or date. Files with names that begin with an underscore (_) such as _index.md (as opposed to index.md) are considered templates or archetypes and are thus not rendered as pages themselves.

Several hundred SSGs have been documented to exist, with the vast majority being written in languages that are already prominent on the web, such as Python, Go, JavaScript and TypeScript.

Many server-side template systems have the option to publish output pages on the server, where the published pages are static. This is common on content management systems, like Vignette, but is not considered out-server generation. In the majority of cases, this "publish option" doesn't interfere with the template system, and it can be made by external software, as Wget.

People began to use server-side dynamic pages generated from templates with pre-existing software adapted for this task. This early software was the preprocessors and macro languages, adapted for web use, running on CGI. Next, a simple but relevant technology was the direct execution made on extension modules, starting with SSI.