YiiPress Static Website Engine

YiiPress is a fast, file-based static website engine powered by Yii3. Write Markdown, build static HTML, and ship blogs, documentation, feeds, sitemaps, taxonomy pages, authors, search, redirects, and assets without a database or any runtime.

Use the static binary for normal projects: it includes the runtime and native extensions, so you do not need Docker, PHP, Composer, or a database on the machine that builds or previews the site.

Features

• Static Linux and Windows binaries for simple installs with no PHP runtime.
• Docker images for CI and container-based workflows.
• Incremental and parallel builds with native Markdown, YAML, and syntax highlighting.
• Plain Markdown/YAML content that works well with Git.
• PHP templates for full control without learning a custom template language.
• Static production output that can be hosted anywhere.
• Markdown content with front matter, collections, standalone pages, taxonomies, authors, date archives, and summaries.
• Feeds, sitemap, canonical URLs, social meta tags, redirects, and static 404.html.
• Native server-side syntax highlighting powered by Rust and syntect.
• Table of contents, Mermaid diagrams, video embeds, fuzzy search, asset fingerprinting, and Telegram import.
• Yii3-based web application, routing, dependency injection, middleware, and PHP template support.

Requirements

• For users: the yiipress static binary for your platform.
• For CI or container workflows: Docker, using the published YiiPress image.
• For engine development from source: Docker and Docker Compose.

Source installs require PHP 8.5 and native extensions. Prefer the binary unless you are developing the engine itself.

Installation

Download the static binary from the latest GitHub release or workflow artifact, then put it in your site repository as yiipress (yiipress.exe on Windows).

Create a content project:

mkdir mysite
cd mysite
cp /path/to/yiipress ./yiipress
chmod +x ./yiipress

Initialize content:

./yiipress init

Start the development server:

./yiipress serve

The preview server prints the URL it is listening on.

General Usage

Configure the site in content/config.yaml:

title: My Site
base_url: https://example.com
languages: [en]
permalink: /:collection/:slug/
taxonomies:
  - tags
  - categories
highlight_theme: "Solarized (dark)"

Create a collection in content/blog/_collection.yaml:

title: Blog
sort_by: date
sort_direction: desc
feed: true
listing: true

Write an entry in content/blog/2026-01-15-hello-world.md:

---
title: Hello World
tags:
  - general
---

Welcome to my site.

Build the static site:

./yiipress build

Generated files are written to output/.

Common commands:

./yiipress new "My First Post" --collection=blog
./yiipress build --workers=4
./yiipress build --drafts --future
./yiipress clean

Engine packaging commands, used by maintainers:

make package-phar
make package
make package-distroless

When using serve, HTML pages include live reload and a small edit button that opens the current Markdown source file in the editor configured in content/config.yaml.

Performance

Current benchmark highlights:

Scenario	Mode	Time
10 000 entries across 3 collections	4 workers	~2.8 s
10 000 entries across 3 collections	incremental	~358 ms
1 000 realistic entries	4 workers	~1.1 s
1 000 realistic entries	incremental	~108 ms

See docs/benchmarking.md for benchmark workflow details.

Documentation

Full documentation is available in docs/ and at yiipress.yiiframework.com.

• Quickstart
• Content
• Configuration
• Commands
• Templates
• Plugins
• Deployment
• Architecture
• Internals

License

YiiPress Static Website Engine is free software. It is released under the terms of the BSD License. Please see LICENSE.md for more information.