17.4k stars · EUPL-1.2 and MIT · v0.23.6 (2026-09-12) · Track this in Scout
A static site generator shipped as one self-contained binary, with Sass, syntax highlighting, image resizing, taxonomies, multilingual sites and a search index all built in.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
Zola is a static site generator written in Rust and shipped as one self-contained file. You write pages in Markdown, which is plain text with a few marks for headings and links, and lay them out with templates in a language called Tera. It compiles style sheets, highlights code, resizes images, builds a search index and handles multiple languages without any add-ons.What it is good for. Anybody who wants a blog or a documentation site that still builds in three years. The usual alternative brings a Node.js project with hundreds of dependencies, and dependency upgrades become a chore that eventually stops the site from building at all. Zola has none of that: the tool is one file, and the output is plain HTML you can host anywhere for nothing. It shipped version 0.23.6 on 12 September 2026, the day before this edition.
- Everything is built in, so there is no add-on ecosystem to maintain and nothing to upgrade but the one program.
- The output is plain files. Hosting costs nothing and nothing can break at 3am.
- Multiple languages are a first-class feature, which matters if a site needs an English half and a Russian half.
- You need to be comfortable with the command line, with Markdown, with TOML settings files and with the Tera template language. A non-programmer meets the template layer on day one.
- Built-in is also a ceiling. There is no add-on system, so if Zola does not do what you need, your choices are to pre-process the files yourself or to patch the program.
- The licence is now dual: code added after version 0.22 is EUPL-1.2 and the earlier code is MIT. Building your own site with Zola imposes nothing on you. Copying and changing Zola itself is a different matter, and EUPL-1.2 is a copyleft licence far fewer lawyers have read than GPL.
- gohugoio/hugo
The same single-file site builder with a far larger feature set and a much bigger community, but a template language many people find harder than Tera.
Track this in Scout - cobalt-org/cobalt.rs
The closest match: also a single Rust file, also plain and quick, but with a smaller feature set and a different template language.
Track this in Scout
brew install zola # macOS winget install getzola.zola # Windows # Linux: pacman -S zola, apk add zola, or snap install --edge zola zola init myblog && cd myblog && zola serve
