Static Sites#

Kiln isn’t only for versioned documentation. The same engine builds a plain static site — a marketing site, a landing page, a portfolio — from a flat set of markdown pages. You opt in simply by not declaring versions: give the KilnSite a navigation closure of Pages and Kiln renders each one at a clean URL.

import Kiln

let site = KilnSite(
    name: "Acme",
    url: "https://acme.example",
    description: "We make excellent widgets.",
    theme: .default(palette: .autoLightDark(primary: .black, accent: .blue))
) {
    Page("Home", "index.md")
    Page("Pricing", "pricing.md")
    Page("About", "about.md")
}

try await Kiln.build(site, contentDirectory: "Content", outputDirectory: "site")

Each Page(_:_:) maps a navigation label to a markdown file under the content directory. index.md becomes the site root (/); pricing.md becomes /pricing/. There’s no version prefix and no version switcher — the URLs stay flat.

Static site vs. versioned docs vs. blog#

A KilnSite takes one of three shapes, decided entirely by which argument you pass. Everything else — content, theming, SEO — is the same.

A static site is the default shape: a KilnSite with neither versions: nor blog: set. vapor.codes itself is built this way.

Everything else still applies#

A static site shares the rest of Kiln unchanged — theming, search, SEO & social cards, link checking, and AI-friendly output all work identically. Per-page front matter (title, description, image) is honoured just as in docs; see Content & Localisation.

Localisation#

A static site is multilingual the same way the rest of Kiln is: pass languages: and translate a page with a locale suffix (about.de.md). Untranslated pages fall back to the default language.

let site = KilnSite(
    name: "Acme",
    url: "https://acme.example",
    languages: [
        .init(.english, isDefault: true),
        .init(.german),
    ]
) {
    Page("Home", "index.md")
    Page("About", "about.md")
}