bmf-san/gohan

gohan feels like a personal static site generator that has grown into a real tool. The core idea is solid: a Go-based SSG that keeps builds fast by using a SHA-256 manifest instead of relying on Git history. That is a practical design choice, especially for blogs with lots of posts or for deployments from fresh clones where git diff is not enough. The fact that it powers bmf-tech.com with 700+ articles gives the project a useful real-world proof point.

The feature set is also broader than the “simple SSG” description suggests. It supports Markdown with front matter, syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, tags/categories, Atom feeds, sitemaps, live reload, themes via Go templates, i18n, OGP image generation, pagination, GitHub source links, related articles, and a built-in plugin system. The README does a good job getting a new user from install to first build, and the docs are split into sensible guides for configuration, templates, taxonomy, CLI usage, plugins, and architecture.

The repo has good engineering signals despite being tiny in public adoption: MIT license, code of conduct, contributing guide, security policy, GoReleaser config, golangci config, CodeQL, CI, Codecov, Go Report Card, 300+ commits, and around 50 releases. That is much more project hygiene than I would expect from a 4-star repository.

The main challenge is positioning. Static site generators are a crowded space, and gohan needs to explain very quickly why someone should pick it over Hugo, Zola, Eleventy, or Astro. The strongest answer seems to be “small Go binary, manifest-based incremental builds, built-in blog features, and a real production blog behind it.” I would put that comparison near the top. I’d also add benchmark numbers for full versus incremental builds on the 700+ article site, plus a small starter theme gallery or example site repo.

Overall, gohan looks well-built and personally battle-tested. It is early from a community standpoint, but the docs, release process, and feature set make it much more credible than its star count suggests.