Plenti - the Svelte SSG taking advantage of the JAMstack

Stephanie — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 20:30:53 +0000

Plenti, a static site generator built on Golang and Svelte, has a new way of doing business and that's without the help of a database. That's right, all your code, content and revisions are flat files that live right inside your project. You don't have to worry about saving data in a SQL database that feels like a complicated Excel sheet you would end up managing and hosting on your server. No, no, and NO. Plenti's information is all stored with Git, meaning the code and content is tracked and logged statically on services such as GitHub and GitLab.

Let's review Jamstack.org's definition of the terminology JAMstack:

"Jamstack is the new standard architecture for the web. Using Git workflows and modern build tools, pre-rendered content is served to a CDN and made dynamic through APIs and serverless functions. Technologies in the stack include JavaScript frameworks, Static Site Generators, Headless CMSs, and CDNs."

Graphic from JAMstack.org.

A quick overview of how Plenti works: It takes instructions written in Svelte and processes them using the Svelte compiler directly in V8 in order to 'translate' them to regular Javascript that the browser can read. This is all handled in a self-contained binary that is downloaded when your first install Plenti, so you don't need any dependencies like Go, NodeJS, NPM, Rollup, or Webpack on your computer for this process to run. That means all you need is some basic knowledge of Svelte to start using Plenti. Even if you've never used Svelte before, it's quick to pick up and you can get really far with only having a fundamental understanding of HTML and CSS. Every time you make changes to your project, Plenti processes the information and generates static HTML files in the background alongside Javascript in the foreground of the site. This is a lightning fast experience for site visitors/users while still providing great SEO to clients.

The great thing about having all these features is the simplicity of builds and the barriers it breaks for new developers wanting to enter to the web dev space. And if you were to take all the websites and look at what features are actually needed, I think you will find there are very few requiring anything more than a simple JAMstack application.

Jim Fisk (@jimafisk) - the creator of Plenti - has a few upcoming talks scheduled. Bring your curiosity and questions to the following free virtual events:

Talk Title: "Behind the Scenes with Plenti - A Svelte Static Site Generator"
Date: 2/17/2021
Time: 6:00 PM EST
Where: JAMstack Boston Meetup
Link: https://www.meetup.com/JAMstack-Boston/events/276320284/

Talk Title: "Plenti: A Svelte Static Site Generator with No Dependencies"
Date: 3/19/2021
Time:11:00 AM - 11:45 AM EST
Where: Nerd Summit 2021
Link: https://nerdsummit.org/#11

Perry the Plenti Planarian fashioning a JAMstack shirt.

Plenti — a Svelte SSG for people that don’t like web maintenance bullsh#t

Stephanie — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:44:36 +0000

**Sound of an alarm clock**
It’s 6am and Stephanie is lying in bed wondering how she should start her day. It’s cold in the house; she left the thermostat low because she’s cheap. It’s snowing outside and the sounds of her cats Comet and Cloud **meows in the distance** can be heard calling for food.

Stephanie grabs her phone and sees there’s yet another security update to do on her client websites and thinks, “great, another day of this crap.”

Cloud

Okay, let’s pull away from the NPR narrative. Seriously though, these are some of the thoughts that run through every freelancer’s head each morning. Plenti was developed by its creator, Jim Fisk, after a decade of using different web frameworks that seemed to be weighing his websites down instead of empowering them. One of the biggest issues being that the technology the client had their website on was simply too complicated for the job at hand. There just has to be an easier, more secure way and that’s where Plenti was derived.

Plenti is a simple open source Static Site Generator (SSG) with a Go backend and Svelte frontend. Jim picked Golang because it is simple, quick and has the ability to generate a binary that can be run on any machine; and Svelte, well, for one, “Svelte is so hot right now” and also because of the power it gives developers to write simple HTML and CSS to create websites. Merging these two technologies was not an easy task, but with V8Go binding the two together, it’s a marriage that works.

"Svelte is so hot right now"

Downloading Plenti is fairly simple and there are no dependencies in order to install. Using my Mac from the year 2012 (only 11 years old) and not being much of a developer — at all — I was able to update Homebrew and go through the steps:

Add the tap: brew tap plentico/homebrew-plenti
Install: brew install plenti

And it’s installed. Now to get a site going, I went on to the next set of steps:

Create a new site: plenti new site my-new-site
Move into the folder you created: cd my-new-site
Start up the development server: plenti serve
Navigate to the site in your browser: localhost:3000

And voilà! I had a new Plenti site! Now, for me, it was really cool to have a website up and running in a matter of four steps after installing the software. If I were to create a blog, I could just update the titles, texts, etc of the default website I just created. This default site is helpful for exploring Plenti for the first time, but more experienced users might want a blank slate, free of any predetermined content or structure. You can start fresh by adding the ‘bare’ flag when creating your site:

Create a new site: 'plenti new site my-new-site -- bare'

Cool so now that you have a starter site or ‘bare’ site up, here’s some cool things already built into Plenti that you can use right now:

Pagination
File-based client routing
Content-driven dynamic components
HTML fallbacks for every page
Themes

While Plenti is still very new, there is a lot to look forward to like hot reloading, incremental builds, better API support and a Plenti CMS! Of course, these things take time and effort. If you would like to contribute to the project in any way, here’s how:

Perry the Plenti planarian

Forem: Stephanie

Plenti - the Svelte SSG taking advantage of the JAMstack

Plenti — a Svelte SSG for people that don’t like web maintenance bullsh#t