TL;DR — Quick Summary

Zola is a fast static site generator built in Rust. Single binary, no dependencies, built-in Sass, syntax highlighting, search — from Markdown to website in seconds.

Zola builds static sites fast. Single binary, Markdown content, Tera templates, built-in Sass and search — no runtime dependencies.

Installation

# macOS
brew install zola

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S zola

# Snap
sudo snap install zola --edge

# Binary (single file, no deps)
# Download from https://github.com/getzola/zola/releases

Usage

# Create a new site
zola init mysite
cd mysite

# Directory structure
# ├── config.toml
# ├── content/
# ├── sass/
# ├── static/
# ├── templates/
# └── themes/

# Dev server with live reload
zola serve
zola serve --port 3000

# Build for production
zola build

# Check for issues
zola check

Configuration

# config.toml
base_url = "https://example.com"
title = "My Site"
description = "A fast static site"
default_language = "en"
compile_sass = true
build_search_index = true
generate_feed = true

[markdown]
highlight_code = true
highlight_theme = "one-dark"

[extra]
author = "Your Name"

Summary

  • Zola is a fast, single-binary static site generator written in Rust
  • Markdown content + Tera templates (Jinja2-like syntax)
  • Built-in Sass compilation, syntax highlighting, and full-text search
  • Live reload dev server, RSS/Atom feed generation
  • Deploys to Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages