setting up a blog site with zola
What is Zola?§
Zola is a fast and easy static site generator written in Rust that builds pages from HTML templates, SASS, and page content written in markdown. It comes bundled as a single exectuable, making installing and configuring via the CLI a breeze; very ergonomic. It's also pretty pluggable, allowing for themes such as the zerm theme that this site is currently using.
Comparisons with other static site generators§
Here's a rip from the Zola docs comparing it to some other similar solutions (which may or may not interest you):
| Zola | Cobalt | Hugo | Pelican | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single binary | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| Language | Rust | Rust | Go | Python |
| Syntax highlighting | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sass compilation | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Assets co-location | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Multilingual site | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Image processing | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Sane template engine | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Themes | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shortcodes | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Internal links | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Link checker | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Table of contents | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Automatic header anchors | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Aliases | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Pagination | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Custom taxonomies | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ |
| Search | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Data files | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| LiveReload | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Netlify support | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ |
| Vercel support | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Cloudflare Pages support | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Breadcrumbs | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| Custom output formats | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ |
How I set up this site with Zola§
Aside from simply installing the zola tool by following the docs, I just initialized a new zola project and installed a theme from the catalog of themes on the zola site. From there, I took some of my blog posts (which I also tend to write in markdown anyway), and pulled those documents in as content in the project. Viola! Some tweaking in the config.toml aside, I tested by serving locally and everything was looking good so it was time to set up an integration with Netlify.
Configuring Zola with Netlify couldn't be simpler. You add a netlify.toml configuration file dictating a few values for your site's setup, and then add the Netlify integration to the repository in question and point the Netlify site to that repo. Previews are then generated on pull request into the repository's main branch, and deploys are automatically kicked off when changes are merged into the main branch.