midas-ssg 0.1.18

A minimal, opinionated static site generator

Midas

A minimal, opinionated static site generator. Drop markdown files into a folder, run one command, and get a clean, fast, multilingual website.

Features

• Zero config for single-language sites
• Markdown with syntax highlighting, tables, strikethrough, inline HTML, and table of contents
• Multilingual support as a first-class feature
• RSS feeds per language
• Built-in templates and CSS that update with the package
• Jinja2 templates — optional override for power users
• Built-in dev server — no extra tools needed
• Custom 404 page — just add content/404.md
• Smart external links — automatically adds target="_blank" and rel="noopener noreferrer" to links outside your site

Installation

Requires Python 3.9 or newer.

pip install midas-ssg

This installs the midas command-line tool.

Quick start

midas init my-blog
cd my-blog
midas serve

Open http://localhost:8000 to see your site.

Commands

Command	Description
midas init <folder>	Scaffold a new Midas project into <folder>. Requires an empty directory.
midas init	Scaffold a new Midas project into the current directory. Also requires an empty directory.
midas build	Build the site to _dist/.
midas serve	Build and start a local dev server. Defaults to http://localhost:8000; picks the next available port if busy.
midas clean	Delete the _dist/ folder.

Deploying

Upload the contents of _dist/ to a static host:

• GitHub Pages — deploy via GitHub Actions
• Cloudflare Pages — connect your repo and set the build command to midas build

Directory structure

After midas init, your project looks like this:

my-blog/
├── .gitignore          # Ignores _dist/, virtual environments, etc.
├── midas.yaml          # Site configuration
├── content/            # Your markdown content
│   ├── index.md        # Homepage
│   ├── p/              # Blog posts (matches postPrefix)
│   └── img/            # Images (copied as-is)
└── static/             # Other static assets (favicons, fonts, etc.)

The built site is written to _dist/.

How it works

Templates

Midas ships with built-in Jinja2 templates (base.html, home.html, post.html, etc.) that live inside the installed package. When you update Midas (pip install -U midas-ssg), your site's HTML updates automatically.

You never have to touch HTML. If you want to customize a template, create a templates/ folder in your project and copy only the files you want to override. Midas will use your version instead of the built-in one, but you'll stop receiving updates for those specific templates.

Styles

Midas provides a built-in light minimalist stylesheet. It is copied to _dist/midas.css on every build.

To customize styles, edit static/style.css. It is copied to _dist/style.css and loaded after midas.css, so any rule you write overrides the base. Keep your overrides minimal — only change what you need.

For other assets (favicons, fonts, PDFs), drop them into static/ and they are copied to _dist/.

Writing content

Blog posts

Create a markdown file in content/p/:

---
title: "Hello World"
description: "My first post"
date: 2025-01-01
---

Your post content here.

Posts are sorted by date. The date must be set in frontmatter — it is not inferred from the filename.

Standalone pages

Any .md file outside p/ becomes a page:

---
title: "About"
---

This is the about page.

Homepage

content/index.md automatically becomes the homepage (the type: home frontmatter is inferred for index.md). You can put metadata in its frontmatter or in midas.yaml under home:.

Multilingual content

Add languages in midas.yaml:

languages:
  default: en
  additional: [fi]

Then create content in content/fi/ for Finnish posts. Frontmatter language takes priority over folder inference.

Configuration

midas.yaml is optional but recommended:

site:
  url: "https://example.com"
  name: "My Site"
  description: "A personal website"
  copyright: "© 2025 Your Name"
  fediverse: "@[e-mail]"

languages:
  default: en
  additional: [fi]

nav:
  - title: "Posts"
    url: "/p/"
  - title: "About"
    url: "/about/"

home:
  name: "Your Name"
  bio: "A short description about you."
  profilePic: "/img/profile.webp"
  socials:
    - name: github
      url: "https://github.com/yourusername"
    - name: email
      url: "mailto:[e-mail]"
  cards:
    - title: "My Project"
      url: "https://example.com/project"

postPrefix: "p"
recentPosts: 3
rss:
  default: "feed.xml"
  additional: "{lang}/feed.xml"

postPrefix sets the URL path for default-language posts and their archive page. With the default "p", posts live at /p/my-post/ and the archive is /p/. Additional languages are unaffected — they use /<lang>/my-post/ and /<lang>/.

Config keys

Key	Description
site.url	Your site's base URL. Enables RSS feeds and smart external-link handling.
site.name	Site name shown in the header and page titles.
site.description	Site description used in RSS feeds.
site.copyright	Footer copyright text. Hide it by leaving empty.
site.fediverse	Fediverse handle (e.g. @[e-mail]). Adds a <meta name="fediverse:creator"> tag.
languages.default	Default language code (e.g. en).
languages.additional	List of additional language codes (e.g. [fi, sv]).
nav	List of {title, url} objects for the navigation bar. If omitted, a "Posts" link and language switchers are shown automatically.
home.name	Name displayed on the homepage.
home.bio	Short bio on the homepage.
home.profilePic	Path to a profile picture. Auto-detected from content/img/profile.* if not set.
home.socials	List of {name, url} social links. Rendered as icons.
home.cards	List of {title, url} link cards on the homepage.
postPrefix	URL prefix for default-language posts (default "p").
recentPosts	Number of recent posts shown on the homepage (default 3).
rss.default	Filename for the default-language RSS feed (default feed.xml).
rss.additional	Filename pattern for additional-language feeds. Use {lang} as a placeholder (default {lang}/feed.xml).

Customization

CSS overrides

Edit static/style.css. For example, to switch to a dark background:

body {
  background: #1a1a1a;
  color: #fafafa;
}

Template overrides

Create a templates/ folder and drop in only the files you want to override. For example, to customize the homepage:

mkdir templates
cp $(python -c "import midas; print(midas.__file__)")/../templates/home.html templates/

Then edit templates/home.html. When you run midas build, you'll see a warning:

Templates overridden: home.html
These will not receive updates from Midas automatically.

Icons

The built-in home.html template renders social icons by looking up SVG files in templates/icons/ by name. If you create a templates/icons/ folder in your project, you can add or replace icons there.

404 page

Create content/404.md to customize your 404 page. It is rendered as _dist/404.html.

Footer credit

The built-in base.html template includes a "Created with Midas" link in the footer. Override the template if you'd like to remove or change it.

Dependencies

• markdown — Markdown parsing
• Pygments — Syntax highlighting
• Jinja2 — Templating
• PyYAML — YAML parsing

License

MIT