About Assemble
Assemble is a command-line tool and developer framework for rapid prototyping and static site generation. It is used for building websites and documentation sites, themes, boilerplates, e-books, UI component libraries and blogs, and is positioned as an alternative to Jekyll for GitHub Pages sites, with roots as a Grunt plugin that later grew into a standalone tool.
It exposes a Templates API for creating and rendering views with any Node.js templating engine, a file system API for reading, writing and copying files, and a task API for defining and running build and watch tasks. Assemble can build purely static sites or hybrid static and dynamic sites, supports streaming so any Gulp plugin can be used in a pipeline, and has a plugin system for extending its behavior.
The project states it has been used by thousands of developers across more than 170 countries, including large organizations, for rapid web development. It is written in JavaScript and CSS tooling for Node.js and released under the MIT license; the related grunt-assemble package serves users who want the original Grunt-based plugin.
Key features
- Static site generation and rapid prototyping
- Templates API supporting any template engine
- File system API for build pipelines
- Task API for build and watch tasks
- Gulp plugin streaming support
- Plugin system for extending functionality
Good fit for
- →Static documentation and marketing sites
- →Scaffolding themes and boilerplates
- Tags
- static-site-generator
- nodejs
- scaffolding
- templates
- gulp
- grunt
- documentation
Assemble: questions and answers
- What is Assemble used for?
- Assemble is a free, MIT-licensed Node.js command-line framework and API for static site generation, rapid prototyping, scaffolds and themes, built for gulp and grunt workflows. It is a good fit for static documentation and marketing sites, and scaffolding themes and boilerplates.
- Is Assemble open source?
- Yes. Assemble is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at assemble/assemble.
- Is Assemble free?
- Yes. Assemble is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- What is Assemble an alternative to?
- Assemble is an open-source alternative to GitHub Pages and GitHub. Other open-source alternatives to GitHub Pages include Coolify.
- Is Assemble actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to Assemble was on 20 February 2022. The project has 4.3k stars on GitHub.
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