Midas

A minimal, opinionated static site generator. Drop markdown files into a folder, run one command, and get a clean, fast, multilingual website.

Features

• Zero config for single-language sites
• Markdown with syntax highlighting, tables, and strikethrough
• Multilingual support as a first-class feature
• RSS feeds per language
• Built-in templates and CSS that update with the package
• Jinja2 templates — optional override for power users
• Built-in dev server — no extra tools needed

Installation

Requires Python 3.9 or newer.

pip install midas-ssg

Or install from source in editable mode for development:

pip install -e .

This installs the midas command-line tool.

Quick start

midas init my-blog
cd my-blog
midas serve

Open http://localhost:8000 to see your site.

Commands

Command	Description
midas init <folder>	Scaffold a new Midas project into <folder>. Requires an empty directory.
midas init	Scaffold a new Midas project into the current directory. Also requires an empty directory.
midas build	Build the site to dist/.
midas serve	Build and start a local development server on http://localhost:8000.
midas clean	Delete the dist/ folder.

Directory structure

After midas init, your project looks like this:

my-blog/
├── midas.yaml          # Site configuration
├── style.css           # Optional CSS overrides (empty by default)
├── content/            # Your markdown content
│   ├── index.md        # Homepage
│   ├── posts/          # Blog posts
│   └── img/            # Images (copied as-is)
└── static/             # Other static assets (favicons, fonts, etc.)

The built site is written to dist/.

How it works

Templates

Midas ships with built-in Jinja2 templates (base.html, home.html, post.html, etc.) that live inside the installed package. When you update Midas (pip install -U midas), your site's HTML updates automatically.

You never have to touch HTML. If you want to customize a template, create a templates/ folder in your project and copy only the files you want to override. Midas will use your version instead of the built-in one, but you'll stop receiving updates for those specific templates.

Styles

Midas provides a built-in light minimalist stylesheet. It is copied to dist/midas.css on every build.

To customize styles, edit the style.css file at your project root. It is copied to dist/style.css and loaded after midas.css, so any rule you write overrides the base. Keep your overrides minimal — only change what you need.

For other assets (favicons, fonts, PDFs), drop them into static/ and they are copied to dist/.

Writing content

Blog posts

Create a markdown file in content/posts/:

---
title: "Hello World"
description: "My first post"
date: 2025-01-01
---

Your post content here.

Posts are sorted by date. The filename can also include a date prefix: 2025-01-01-hello-world.md.

Standalone pages

Any .md file outside posts/ becomes a page:

---
title: "About"
---

This is the about page.

Homepage

content/index.md with type: home becomes the homepage. You can put metadata in its frontmatter or in midas.yaml under home:.

Multilingual content

Add languages in midas.yaml:

languages:
  default: en
  additional: [fi]

Then create content in content/fi/posts/ for Finnish posts. Frontmatter language takes priority over folder inference.

Configuration

midas.yaml is optional but recommended:

site:
  url: "https://example.com"
  name: "My Site"
  description: "A personal website"
  copyright: "© 2024 Your Name"

languages:
  default: en
  additional: [fi]

home:
  name: "Your Name"
  bio: "A short description about you."
  profilePic: "/img/profile.webp"
  socials:
    - name: github
      url: "https://github.com/yourusername"
    - name: email
      url: "mailto:hello@example.com"
  cards:
    - title: "My Project"
      url: "https://example.com/project"

recentPosts: 3

Customization

CSS overrides

Edit style.css at your project root. For example, to switch to a dark background:

body {
  background: #1a1a1a;
  color: #fafafa;
}

Template overrides

Create a templates/ folder and drop in only the files you want to override. For example, to customize the homepage:

mkdir templates
cp $(python -c "import midas; print(midas.__file__)")/../templates/home.html templates/

Then edit templates/home.html. When you run midas build, you'll see a warning:

Templates overridden: home.html
These will not receive updates from Midas automatically.

Icons

The built-in home.html template renders social icons by looking up SVG files in templates/icons/ by name. If you create a templates/icons/ folder in your project, you can add or replace icons there.

Dependencies

• markdown — Markdown parsing
• Pygments — Syntax highlighting
• Jinja2 — Templating
• PyYAML — YAML parsing

License

MIT