Hugo

Hugo is the most widely used static site generator. It's written in Go, ships as a single binary, and is genuinely fast. Fanstatic follows many of Hugo's conventions, so users familiar with Hugo will find Fanstatic familiar — with a few deliberate differences.

What Fanstatic and Hugo have in common

  • Single binary, no runtime required
  • Content in content/ as Markdown with YAML front matter
  • Sections and taxonomies
  • Aliases (redirect pages)
  • RSS feeds and sitemaps
  • Live reload dev server

Where Fanstatic differs

Templates: Liquid vs. Go templates

Hugo uses Go's text/template package. The syntax is terse but quirky — pipeline chains, context binding, and the lack of a named page object make non-trivial templates hard to read:

{{ range where .Site.RegularPages "Section" "blog" }}
    {{ .Title }}
{{ end }}

Fanstatic uses Liquid, the same language as Shopify and Jekyll. It's expressive, readable, and has an explicit page object:

{% assign posts = site.RegularPages | where: 'Section', 'blog' %}
{% for post in posts %}
    {{ post.Title }}
{% endfor %}

Configuration: YAML only

Hugo supports YAML, TOML, and JSON config files. Fanstatic uses YAML exclusively (fanstatic.yaml), which eliminates format ambiguity.

Front matter: PascalCase

Hugo front matter keys are typically camelCase or lowercase. Fanstatic uses PascalCase (Title, Date, Tags). This is consistent throughout — front matter, template variables, and site config all use the same casing.

Language: .NET vs. Go

Fanstatic is built on .NET. If you're a C# developer, you can read and contribute to the source, run the build tools you already know, and integrate Fanstatic into .NET-based workflows. It also ships with a C# API documentation generator.

Migration from Hugo

See Fanstatic for Hugo Users for a field-by-field migration guide.

See Feature Comparison for a detailed table of which Hugo features are implemented in Fanstatic.

Quick Start