Static site generator for Markdown and Twig

A simple and powerful content-driven static site generator.

Cecil is a CLI application that merges plain text files (written in Markdown), images and Twig templates to generate a static website.

📄Documentation · 💻Demo · 🐛Issues tracker · 💬Discussions

Quick Start

Read the Quick Start documentation page.

Create and deploy a blog site:

Features

• No database, no server, no dependency: performance and security
• Your pages are stored in Markdown flat files with a YAML front matter
• Powered by Twig, a flexible template engine, with themes support
• Pagination, sitemap, redirections, robots.txt, taxonomies, RSS are generated automatically
• Handles and optimizes assets for you
• Download one file and run it
• Easy to deploy

Requirements

• PHP 8.3+

Installation

Download cecil.phar from your terminal:

curl -LO https://github.com/Cecilapp/Cecil/releases/latest/download/cecil.phar

Other installation methods:

• Homebrew: brew install cecilapp/tap/cecil
• Scoop: scoop install https://cecil.app/scoop/cecil.json
• Manual download page: cecil.app/download

Usage

Common commands:

php cecil.phar help      # Get help
php cecil.phar new:site  # Create a new website
php cecil.phar build     # Build your website
php cecil.phar serve     # Preview your website locally

Contributing

See Contributing.

Thanks goes to these wonderful people:

Arnaud Ligny 🐛 📖 🤔 🚧 📣 💬 👀 🌍 📢	Frank Taillandier 📖 🤔 📣 🌍 🧑‍🏫	Martin Szulecki 🐛 💻 🤔	Matthieu Vion 🐛 💻	Chun-Sheng, Li 💻 🛡️	Benjamin Hirsch 🐛 💻
Pete Favelle 🐛 💻 🤔	Gert de Pagter 🐛 🚇	Joe Vallender 🐛	Jawira Portugal 🐛	Yufan You 🛡️	Mathieu Santostefano 📖 🐛
Max 📖	Progi1984 💻 🤔	Franck Matsos 💻

This project follows the all-contributors specification (emoji key). Contributions of any kind welcome!

npm install -g all-contributors-cli
npx all-contributors add
npx all-contributors generate

Development

Install dependencies:

composer install

Run all quality checks:

composer code

Run individual checks:

composer code:analyse
composer code:style
composer test
composer test:cli

Build binaries

Build binaries with Box and phpacker:

# Install Box and phpacker globally
composer global require humbug/box
composer global require phpacker/phpacker
export PATH=~/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH
# Build the PHAR file and the package
composer run build:phar
composer run build:package

Build API documentation

Build the API documentation with phpDocumentor:

# Download phpDocumentor PHAR
curl -Lo phpdoc https://phpdoc.org/phpDocumentor.phar
# Build the API documentation
php phpdoc

Release

To release a new version, create a new Git tag with the version number (e.g. 1.0.0), push it to GitHub and the release will be automatically published by GitHub Actions.

git tag 1.0.0
git push origin 1.0.0

[!TIP] To create a pre-release, add a suffix to the version number (e.g. 1.0.0-beta.1).

The automated workflow also will publish the release to the website, update the Homebrew formula and the Scoop manifest.

AI agent skill

Cecil ships with an agent skill that teaches AI coding agents (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) how to build and configure Cecil sites.

Install it with the GitHub CLI using the gh skill install command:

gh skill install Cecilapp/Cecil cecil

By default the skill is installed at project scope for GitHub Copilot. Use --scope user to make it available everywhere, and --agent to target another agent:

gh skill install Cecilapp/Cecil cecil --scope user --agent claude-code

Once installed, ask your agent to create, build, configure, or deploy a Cecil site and it will use the skill automatically.

Sponsors

                 

License

Cecil is a free software licensed under the EUPL-1.2 license.

The Cecil documentation is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Libraries used by Cecil are subject to their respective licenses (run composer licenses).

Cecil © Arnaud Ligny
Logo © Cécile Ricordeau