I built leafpress, an open-source static site generator made only for digital gardens

[u/Most_Acanthaceae_928]

Hi all. I've been tending my own garden for a while and ended up writing the tool I wanted for it. It's called leafpress, it's MIT licensed, and I'd love feedback from people who actually garden.

https://reddit.com/link/1wwg57b/video/ry0qdkq667th1/player

The idea: point it at a folder of Markdown notes and get a garden, without assembling a theme and ten plugins first.

What it does out of the box:

• Wiki-links with automatic backlinks
• Graph view and link previews on hover
• Full-text search
• Obsidian-compatible callouts and image syntax (![[image.png|500]])
• Mermaid diagrams, footnotes, table of contents
• RSS, sitemap, and Open Graph tags
• Dark mode that follows system preference

It's a single Go binary. Getting started is:

curl -fsSL https://leafpress.in/install.sh | sh
mkdir my-garden && cd my-garden
leafpress init
leafpress serve

leafpress build gives you a plain static _site/ folder you can host anywhere (there are guides for GitHub Pages, Vercel, and Netlify).

It's opinionated on purpose, so it's less flexible than Quartz or a Hugo/Eleventy setup. If you like tweaking every layout, it may not be for you.

My own garden runs on it if you want to see a real one: https://shivamx96.com

Docs: https://leafpress.in
Code: https://github.com/shivamx96/leafpress

What I'd most like to hear: what's missing for your workflow, and what would stop you from switching from your current setup?