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Q&A Reusing HTML without rewriting it

Use a static site generator. There are other possibilities, but they seem more complicated or worse for your use case. A static site generator takes in source data in some combination of markup fo...

posted 4mo ago by Derek Elkins‭  ·  edited 3mo ago by Karl Knechtel‭

Answer
#2: Post edited by user avatar Karl Knechtel‭ · 2024-08-10T22:45:37Z (3 months ago)
Improve clarity: simplify a bit; minor word-choice etc. tweaks; fix per comment discussion to present two ways of implementing a SSG clearly (instead of as separate but "related solutions")
  • There are essentially two related decent solutions to this. There are other possibilities, but they seem more complicated or worse for your use-case.
  • The solution is to use a [static site generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_site_generator). These take in HTML and/or Markdown and/or several other potential markup formats, and generate HTML from those. A key feature of these tools is support for templates which can capture the common structure of related types of pages. These tools can usually do other things such as generating navigation bars, tables of contents, or RSS/Atom feeds.
  • So the first solution is to use a static site generator and simply commit the resulting generated HTML to GitHub. This is exactly what I do for my GitHub Pages hosted site using [Hakyll](https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/) as the static site generator. The benefit of this approach is that you can use whatever static site generator you want, and you don't need any special support from your hosting provider. The latter means that if you decided to host your site somewhere else, you just need to upload the generated HTML somewhere else.
  • The second solution, and probably the better one for you, is to use [the static site generator built in to GitHub Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll). In particular, GitHub Pages supports [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/), a popular Ruby-based static site generator. For your specific purpose, you'd probably want to use the [layouts](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/layouts/) and/or [includes](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/includes/) feature. The benefits of this approach is that you don't need to setup Jekyll yourself (though you will probably want to), and the history of your GitHub repository will reflect the actual meaningful changes you make and not a bunch of generated noise.
  • Use a [static site generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_site_generator). There are other possibilities, but they seem more complicated or worse for your use case.
  • A static site generator takes in source data in some combination of markup formats (commonly including raw HTML and Markdown) and generates complete HTML pages from that. A key feature of these tools is support for templates which can capture the common structure of related types of pages. These tools usually offer additional features, e.g. they may be able to generate navigation bars, tables of contents, and RSS/Atom feeds.
  • There are two basic ways to go about this. First, you can choose your own static site generator, run it locally, and simply commit the resulting generated HTML to GitHub. This is exactly what I do for my GitHub Pages hosted site using [Hakyll](https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/) as the static site generator. The benefit of this approach is that you don't need any special support from your hosting provider - so if you decide to host your site somewhere else, you just need to upload the generated HTML somewhere else.
  • The second way, which is probably better in your situation, is to use [the static site generator built in to GitHub Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll). In particular, GitHub Pages supports [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/), a popular Ruby-based static site generator. For your specific purpose, you'd probably want to use the [layouts](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/layouts/) and/or [includes](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/includes/) feature. This way, you don't need to set up Jekyll yourself (though you will probably want to), and the history of your GitHub repository will reflect the actual meaningful changes you make and not a bunch of generated noise.
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Derek Elkins‭ · 2024-07-28T03:47:46Z (4 months ago)
There are essentially two related decent solutions to this. There are other possibilities, but they seem more complicated or worse for your use-case.

The solution is to use a [static site generator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_site_generator). These take in HTML and/or Markdown and/or several other potential markup formats, and generate HTML from those. A key feature of these tools is support for templates which can capture the common structure of related types of pages. These tools can usually do other things such as generating navigation bars, tables of contents, or RSS/Atom feeds.

So the first solution is to use a static site generator and simply commit the resulting generated HTML to GitHub. This is exactly what I do for my GitHub Pages hosted site using [Hakyll](https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/) as the static site generator. The benefit of this approach is that you can use whatever static site generator you want, and you don't need any special support from your hosting provider. The latter means that if you decided to host your site somewhere else, you just need to upload the generated HTML somewhere else.

The second solution, and probably the better one for you, is to use [the static site generator built in to GitHub Pages](https://docs.github.com/en/pages/setting-up-a-github-pages-site-with-jekyll). In particular, GitHub Pages supports [Jekyll](https://jekyllrb.com/), a popular Ruby-based static site generator. For your specific purpose, you'd probably want to use the [layouts](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/layouts/) and/or [includes](https://jekyllrb.com/docs/includes/) feature. The benefits of this approach is that you don't need to setup Jekyll yourself (though you will probably want to), and the history of your GitHub repository will reflect the actual meaningful changes you make and not a bunch of generated noise.