About
Puppy is an adorable tool for scaffolding prototypes.
Specifically, it's intended to help give designers (who code!) at Upstatement a comfortable environment to start building out UI/UX in code without the overhead of a full blown production environment.
It uses many of the same tools we use in production (Twig, Webpack, Babel), which makes it easy to port to a production environment if needed.
While it's intended to be used for prototyping, it's equally capable of generating a production-ready static site, and can be used as a lightweight static site generator as well.
While it can be used as a static site generator, it lacks many of the features of tools like Hugo, Jekyll, or Gatsby.
It's also not the best tool to use if you want to use a front-end framework like React or Vue. You're better off using their scaffolding tools (Create React App or Vue CLI) or one of the many frameworks that allow you to build static sites with them (Gatsby, VuePress, Next, Nuxt, etc.).
Finally, it really is intended for static sites. It can work well with serverless solutions (e.g. Netlify functions or Cloudflare Workers), but if you need a server you're probably better off using something else.
The first iteration of Puppy was called up-pe -- Upstatement Prototyping Environment. You couldn't say it without thinking about puppies, so for the second version we just called it Puppy.