Rust Static Site Generator (SSG)

Lightweight and fast CLI tool written in Rust that recursively scans a directory of Markdown files, extractcs YAML frontmatter, converts the Markdown to HTML, and generate a fully linked static website while preserving your folder structure.

Features

• Recursive Directory Traversal: Scans deeply nested folders to find every .md file.
• Frontmatter Parsing: Extracts YAML metadata (Title, Date, Description) from the top of Markdown files.
• Markdown to HTML: Uses pulldown-cmark for highly compliant, fast Markdown parsing.
• Structure Mirroring: Automatically replicates your input directory's folder tree inside the output directory.
• HTML Templating: Wraps the generated HTML inside a standard web document structure.

Prerequisites

You will need Rust and Cargo installed on your machine to run this project.

Installation

Clone the repository and build the project using Cargo:

git clone https://github.com/ansh3108/markdown-cli.git
cd markdown-cli
cargo build --release

Usage

The CLI requires two arguments: the input directory containing your Markdown files, and the output directory where you want the HTML output to be saved.

#Run via cargo:
cargo run -- ./content ./public

# Or run the compiled binary directly:
./target/release/my_ssg ./content ./public

Markdown File Format

For the parser to work correctly, every Markdown file must include YAML frontmatter enclosed in --- at the very top of the file.

The frontmatter expects three fields: title,date, and description.

Example content/hello-world.md:

---
title: My First Rust Post
date: "2026-08-06"
description: Learning how to build a Static Site Generator
---

# Hello from Rust!

This is a paragraph of **Markdown** text. 

* Here is a list item
* Here is another one

Directory Mirrorring

The tool will respect your folder hirarchy. If you structure input like this:

content/
├── index.md
└── blog/
    └── my-post.md

The output will automatically generate the corresponding folders:

public/
├── index.html
└── blog/
    └── my-post.html

Dependencies

• serde&serde_yaml: For deserializing YAML frontmatter into Rust structs.
• pulldown-cmark: A fast, CommonMark-compliant Markdown parser.