sgelt

A simple static site generator for research labs.

Sgelt builds a complete static website from Markdown content, Jinja2 templates, and JSON data files. It is designed for research institutions: seminars, conferences, defenses, team pages, news, and a searchable index.

Features

• Markdown content with YAML frontmatter
• Jinja2 templates for full layout control
• Agenda (seminars, conferences, defenses) with pagination by year
• Team pages with members and organizing seminars
• News with paginated indexes
• iCal export for seminar calendars
• Lunr.js search index
• Systematic checks (sgelt --check): broken links, orphan assets, duplicates
• Dev server with livereload (sgelt --serve)

Installation

pip install sgelt
# or
uv add sgelt

Quick start

mkdir mysite && cd mysite
sgelt --init        # scaffold: templates/, config.yml, content/index.md
sgelt               # build the site
sgelt --serve       # build + dev server on http://localhost:5500

sgelt --init creates a complete project structure with starter templates bundled in the package (sgelt/templates/). Edit config.yml and content/index.md, then build.

Demo site

To see what a complete site looks like, generate one with random demo content:

mkdir mysite && cd mysite
sgelt --init --demo # scaffold + random news, teams, seminars, conferences
sgelt --serve       # preview at http://localhost:5500

--demo uses Faker to generate realistic but entirely fictional content: news articles, team pages with members, seminar series, conferences, and defenses (2020-2026). Requires the dev extra: uv sync --extra dev or pip install sgelt[dev].

A live demo is published at irma.pages.math.unistra.fr/sgelt.

Manual setup

Create a site project with this structure:

mysite/
├── config.yml          # site configuration
├── content/            # Markdown pages
│   ├── home/           # homepage cards
│   ├── teams/          # team pages
│   └── ...
├── templates/          # Jinja2 templates (copy from sgelt --init or customize)
├── static/             # CSS, JS, images
├── data/               # JSON data (agenda, teams)
│   ├── archive/        # agenda archive by year
│   └── teams.json      # team members
└── output/             # generated site (git-ignored)

Then build:

cd mysite
sgelt           # build the site
sgelt --check   # run checks
sgelt --serve   # build + dev server on http://localhost:5500
sgelt --clean   # remove output/

Configuration (config.yml)

site:
  title: "My Lab"
  url: "https://lab.example.org"
  # today: 2026-10-23  # override date for reproducible builds

nav_items:
  Home: index.html
  Team: teams/index.html
  Agenda:
    Upcoming: agenda/a_venir.html

Data files

• data/archive/<year>.json — agenda archive (seminars, conferences, defenses)
• data/agenda_indico.json — optional Indico events (merged with archive)
• data/teams.json — team members and affiliations

See data/*.schema.json for the expected JSON schemas.

Development

git clone <repo>
cd sgelt
uv sync --extra dev
uv run pytest -q
uv run ruff check
uv run ty check

License

MIT