A simple and powerful content-driven static site generator.

Cecil is a CLI application that merges plain text files (written in Markdown), images and Twig templates to generate a static website.

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Cecil CLI animated demo

Quick Start

Read the Quick Start documentation page.

Create and deploy a blog site:

Features

No database, no server, no dependency: performance and security
Your pages are stored in Markdown flat files with a YAML front matter
Powered by Twig, a flexible template engine, with themes support
Pagination, sitemap, redirections, robots.txt, taxonomies, RSS are generated automatically
Handles and optimizes assets for you
Download one file and run it
Easy to deploy

Requirements

PHP 8.3+

Installation

Download cecil.phar from your terminal:

curl -LO https://github.com/Cecilapp/Cecil/releases/latest/download/cecil.phar

Other installation methods:

Homebrew: brew install cecilapp/tap/cecil
Scoop: scoop install https://cecil.app/scoop/cecil.json
Manual download page: cecil.app/download

Usage

Common commands:

php cecil.phar help      # Get help
php cecil.phar new:site  # Create a new website
php cecil.phar build     # Build your website
php cecil.phar serve     # Preview your website locally

Contributing

See Contributing.

Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):

This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!

npx all-contributors add
npx all-contributors generate

Development

Install dependencies:

composer install

Run all quality checks:

composer code

Run individual checks:

composer code:analyse
composer code:style
composer test
composer test:cli

Build binaries

Build binaries with Box and phpacker:

# Install Box and phpacker globally
composer global require humbug/box
composer global require phpacker/phpacker
export PATH=~/.composer/vendor/bin:$PATH
# Build the PHAR file and the package
composer run build:phar
composer run build:package

Build API documentation

Build the API documentation with phpDocumentor:

# Download phpDocumentor PHAR
curl -Lo phpdoc https://phpdoc.org/phpDocumentor.phar
# Build the API documentation
php phpdoc

Release

To release a new version, create a new Git tag with the version number (e.g. 1.0.0), push it to GitHub and the release will be automatically published by GitHub Actions.

git tag 1.0.0
git push origin 1.0.0

[!TIP] To create a pre-release, add a suffix to the version number (e.g. 1.0.0-beta.1).

The automated workflow also will publish the release to the website, update the Homebrew formula and the Scoop manifest.

AI agent skill

Cecil ships with an agent skill that teaches AI coding agents (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc.) how to build and configure Cecil sites.

Install it with the GitHub CLI using the gh skill install command:

gh skill install Cecilapp/Cecil cecil

By default the skill is installed at project scope for GitHub Copilot. Use --scope user to make it available everywhere, and --agent to target another agent:

gh skill install Cecilapp/Cecil cecil --scope user --agent claude-code

Once installed, ask your agent to create, build, configure, or deploy a Cecil site and it will use the skill automatically.

License

Cecil is a free software licensed under the EUPL-1.2 license.

The Cecil documentation is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Libraries used by Cecil are subject to their respective licenses (run composer licenses).

Cecil

At a glance

README