What is Glaze? #

Glaze is a static site generator written in PHP. You write content in Djot files, build layouts with Sugar templates, and run one command to get a folder of plain HTML ready to deploy anywhere.

The idea behind it #

Glaze is built for PHP developers who want to ship a site without adopting a new ecosystem. It uses familiar tools and keeps the project structure simple enough that you can understand every part of it:

Composer for installation
Sugar for templates — layout inheritance, components, and directives in plain .php files
NEON for configuration and frontmatter — readable maps and lists
Djot for content — clean markup with a fully-specified grammar

No unfamiliar build infrastructure. Install it, scaffold a project, and start writing.

What it feels like #

Install it once:

composer global require josbeir/glaze

Scaffold a new project:

glaze init my-site
cd my-site
glaze serve

Open http://127.0.0.1:8080. Your site is running. Edit a .dj file in content/, refresh the browser, and the change is there. No watch process, no cache to flush, no rebuild step.

When you are ready to ship:

glaze build

public/ now contains everything needed to deploy. Upload it, push it to an S3 bucket, drop it on Netlify — done.

The moving parts #

Djot for content #

Djot is designed by John MacFarlane, the author of Pandoc and CommonMark. Its syntax is familiar if you have written Markdown before, but its grammar is fully-specified — parsing is consistent and deterministic across all implementations.

Each content file is a .dj file with optional NEON frontmatter at the top:

---
title: Hello world
date: 2026-02-24
tags:
  - hello
  - news
---
# Hello world

Your content here.

See Why not Markdown? for a full comparison.

Sugar for templates #

Sugar is a PHP template engine with layout inheritance, reusable components, and attribute-based directives. Templates are .sugar.php files — plain PHP with full IDE support.

<s-template s:extends="layout/base">

<s-template s:block="content">
    <article>
        <h1><?= $page->title ?></h1>
        <?= $content |> raw() ?>
    </article>
</s-template>

Sugar handles HTML escaping automatically based on output context, so you do not need to call htmlspecialchars() by hand on most values.

NEON for configuration #

glaze.neon is the project configuration file. NEON is a clean, human-readable format — think YAML but tidier. The same format is used for frontmatter, so you only have one syntax to learn for both.

site:
  title: My Site
  baseUrl: https://example.com

taxonomies:
  - tags

contentTypes:
  blog:
    paths:
      - match: blog

A CLI that stays small #

Four commands. That is it.

glaze init — scaffold a new project
glaze new — create a content page interactively
glaze serve — live development server
glaze build — generate static output

Who it is for #

Glaze is a good fit if you:

Work in PHP and want your site tooling to match
Are building a documentation site, personal blog, project page, or any content-heavy site
Want a simple, auditable build pipeline with no hidden moving parts
Write structured content that benefits from predictable, well-specified markup parsing

It is less suitable if you need a CMS with an admin UI or user authentication — those problems call for a different kind of tool.

Optional modern asset workflow #

If you need it, Glaze has optional Vite integration. Scaffold everything in one command:

glaze init my-site --vite

This wires up a Vite config alongside your Glaze project. Start both together:

glaze serve --vite

Sugar’s s:vite directive renders the right tags automatically in both dev and production mode. If you do not need Vite, you never have to think about it.

Ready to get started? Continue with Installation.