Pencil is a static site generator written in Haskell.
With Pencil, you write Haskell code to generate your website from source files (HTML, CSS, Markdown). Pencil comes pre-loaded with blogging, tagging, templating, and Markdown and Sass/Scss. And it’s flexible enough to extend for your own needs.
Jump right in with the first tutorial, Getting Started.
This website itself is generated via Pencil. You can view the source code here.
Why use Pencil when there’s already Hakyll?
I used Hakyll for a while but found it a bit too complicated for my needs. As a Haskell beginner I found it difficult extend beyond what was provided because I couldn’t understand what was going on underneath the hood.
Pencil is a simpler, beginner-friendly alternative to Hakyll. It’s especially designed to be easy to understand and modify.
Pencil and the tutorials present here were designed with the beginner Haskeller in mind. It is expected, however, that you have a good grasp of basic Haskell syntax, functions, algebraic data types (the data keyword), records, maps and filters, and data structures like Data.Map. A preliminary knowledge of how to use monads is also expected, though you don’t need to know exactly how they’re implemented.