An opinionated CLI for building small static websites from files.
You work with content, presentation, configuration, routes and assets. Norna provides the website implementation and builds the result as a static site.
The goal is not to give you another framework for constructing websites. Norna gives you a defined site model to work within.
You describe the site rather than implement it.
Norna deliberately gives you a defined way to structure a website.
Content belongs in content files. Visual presentation belongs in the theme. Technical behaviour belongs in configuration. Additional pages are routes. Images and public assets have defined places.
For normal site work, you do not build templates, components or rendering logic for each project. Norna provides that presentation layer as part of the tool.
This makes Norna less general-purpose than a traditional static site generator or web framework - intentionally.
The trade-off is less architectural freedom in exchange for less website implementation work.
A typical Norna site looks like this:
site/
config.mjs
theme.md
content.md
routes/
images/
public/content.md - what the homepage says and how its sections are organisedtheme.md - how the site looksconfig.mjs - technical behaviour such as URL, base path, language labels
and publishing settingsroutes/ - additional pagesimages/ - source images used by the sitepublic/ - static files copied into the published siteContent, presentation and technical configuration stay separate, while routes and assets can be added as the site grows.
The files are ordinary project files: they can be edited, versioned, reviewed and kept together with the project they describe.
A Norna build turns the source files into static website output in dist/.
Norna currently integrates publishing with GitHub Pages. The generated website is static, so other static hosting services are technically possible publishing targets, but Norna does not provide integrations for them today.
Additional publishing integrations may be added in the future.
A general-purpose static site generator usually gives you tools for building a website: templates, layouts, components, data pipelines and rendering primitives.
Norna works at a higher level of abstraction.
You provide the site’s content, presentation choices, configuration, routes and assets. Norna owns more of the website implementation.
That means Norna is not trying to maximise flexibility. It is trying to minimise how much website-specific implementation you need for the kinds of sites it supports.
The website lives in ordinary files that can be read, edited, reviewed and versioned together with the rest of the project.
There is no separate CMS or content database that has to be kept in sync with the repository.
Editorial content belongs in content files, visual defaults in theme.md, and
technical settings in config.mjs.
The structure is deliberately constrained so that each file has a clear role.
For normal site work, you work with the Norna model instead of creating a new template/component architecture for every site.
The result of a build is a static website in dist/.
The build output is separate from the source files.
Edit the files under site/; let Norna generate dist/.
Norna is intended for relatively small, mostly static websites where a file-driven and versioned workflow is useful.
Typical uses include:
Norna is a good fit when the site can live naturally as files and when a defined presentation model is preferable to building a custom web architecture.
It is not intended to replace a general-purpose framework for dynamic web applications or projects that need complete control over their rendering architecture.
npx @janga/norna@latest init my-site
cd my-site
npm install
npm run devRead Getting Started for the full first-site flow.
Norna is open source software released under GNU GPL v3.