We are excited to announce the official release of Vanilla Gorilla, a minimalist, lightning-fast static site compiler built on pure Vanilla HTML, CSS, and client-side JavaScript.

Vanilla Gorilla handles the heavy technical lifting of compiling templates, markdown content, and styling so that you can focus on building beautiful sites and content. It is now open-source and available on GitHub.

Check out the repository: GitHub - exhibita/vanilla-gorilla

What is Vanilla Gorilla?

Vanilla Gorilla is a static site generator designed for developers who appreciate the simplicity and speed of vanilla web technologies, but want the convenience of modern templating and markdown-based page generation. It compiles standard HTML templates and Markdown files into static pages, maintaining a clean and highly organized output.

Under the hood, Vanilla Gorilla uses a lean Node.js build pipeline powered by:

Cheerio: For DOM parsing, layouts, and relative path adjustment.
Marked: For compiling Markdown documents to HTML.
Gray-matter: For reading YAML frontmatter in content files.
Chokidar: For instant, incremental rebuilds during development.

Built for Agentic Workflows

What makes Vanilla Gorilla unique is that it is pre-optimized for agentic workflows. If you use an AI-assisted development environment like Antigravity IDE, Vanilla Gorilla includes native .agents instructions and specialized skills.

These configurations allow your AI assistant to:

Understand the layout of your project automatically.
Create new pages or blog posts using scaffolding scripts.
Apply design revisions to your style sheets.
Run validation scripts to ensure deployment safety.

By combining the simplicity of static sites with the capabilities of agentic coding, developers can achieve an "Intent-First" workflow—scaffolding pages, writing copy, and updating designs via high-level commands.

Scaffolding a New Site with `create-vanilla-gorilla`

To make it as simple as possible to get started, we have also released the create-vanilla-gorilla package. You can bootstrap a fully functional static site in seconds with a single command:

npx create-vanilla-gorilla my-new-site

This scaffolding CLI will:

Download the latest release of the Vanilla Gorilla compiler and layout structure.
Set up the directory structure.
Configure a local Git repository automatically.
Provide clear next steps to start building.

Quick Start Instructions

Once you have scaffolded your site, follow these simple steps to run it locally:

Navigate into the folder:
```
cd my-new-site
```
Install the dependencies:
```
npm install
```
Start the watch server:
```
npm run watch
```

The compiler will clean the target directory, minify the CSS, and start watching for any file modifications. Every time you save a file in src/, Vanilla Gorilla will instantly compile it to the dist/ directory, allowing you to preview changes in real-time.

Pretty URLs Out of the Box

Vanilla Gorilla ensures that your website has clean, professional URLs (e.g., /blog/introducing-vanilla-gorilla/ instead of /blog/introducing-vanilla-gorilla.html). It compiles page files as index.html inside subfolders corresponding to their slug.

To scaffold a new markdown-based blog post, you can run:

npm run create-md -- blog blog/my-new-post

And for a custom HTML page layout:

npm run create-page -- gallery gallery/travel-photos

The scaffolding scripts automatically calculate depth-adjusted paths for all static asset links, header includes, and stylesheets, ensuring everything works perfectly on both local preview servers and remote production hosting.

Open Source and Ready to Build

Vanilla Gorilla is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3) and is open for community contributions. Whether you are building a simple landing page, a portfolio, or a personal blog, Vanilla Gorilla gives you the tools to compile, optimize, and deploy without the overhead of massive frontend frameworks.

Give it a spin today and let us know what you build!