A static site generator for hackers.
Fast static pages · a proper blog · your developer story — with first-class support for the agents that help you build it.

cherrybomb.dev · Guides · Design · ADRs · Changelog

CherryBomb is a modern take on Octopress: your site is a repo, publishing is a task, everything is hackable — without the part where upgrading the framework ruins your week. The engine is Elixir, the CLI is cherry, and the output is plain HTML you can host anywhere.

Install

One line, no toolchain:

curl -fsSL https://cherrybomb.dev/install.sh | sh   # macOS / Linux
irm https://cherrybomb.dev/install.ps1 | iex        # Windows

Upgrading is cherry upgrade — checksum-verified against the release, rustup-style.

Use from Elixir

Cherry is an ordinary hex package; the binary is just a convenience wrapper around it.

Scaffolding: cherry_new

cherry_new is the project generator — a tiny separate package whose only job is to give you mix cherry.new mysite before you have Cherry itself, the same pattern Phoenix uses with phx_new. Install it once as a mix archive and the task is available globally, outside any project:

mix archive.install hex cherry_new
mix cherry.new mysite

The scaffold is a complete site: content directories, a cherry.exs config, a first post, a GitHub Pages deploy workflow, an AGENTS.md describing the publish loop, and a mix.exs that depends on the cherry release matching the installer — from there the site's own {:cherry, "~> 0.1.0-rc.3"} dependency pulls the real framework:

def deps do
  [
    {:cherry, "~> 0.1.0-rc.3"}
  ]
end

The tasks

Every cherry <verb> is also mix cherry.<verb>, flag for flag, and every one of them takes --json for a structured envelope:

As a library

Cherry.build/1 and Cherry.check/1 return structs (Cherry.Build, Cherry.Check.Diagnostic), so custom tooling composes without shelling out — see the API docs.

Quickstart

cd mysite
cherry gen.post "Hello, world"
cherry serve                      # live-reloading dev server
cherry build                      # → _site/, plain files, deploy anywhere
cherry gen.action                 # GitHub Pages workflow, done

What you get

Fast static pages. Prerendered HTML, zero JavaScript by default. Enhancements (theme toggle, search) are tiny islands that fail soft.

A blog that behaves. Markdown + YAML frontmatter, validated against a schema at build time — errors name the file and the field. Tags, drafts, future posts, Atom + JSON feeds, sitemap, canonical URLs, OpenGraph and JSON-LD, all default-on.

A developer story, not a résumé. The portfolio is data: positions, projects, talks, open source — rendered as a timeline, cross-linked with your blog through one shared tag taxonomy. The "Elixir" page shows your jobs, projects, and every post you've written about it.

…and a CV when you need one. The same data also renders at /cv/ as a web page that reads like a CV — link employers to it instead of attaching a file. Every skill claim links to its evidence in your story, it prints pixel-perfect, exports as JSON Resume at /cv.json, and has an unlisted mode for quiet job hunts.

Themes you can actually swap. Themes implement a versioned contract (templates + design tokens), so switching is one config line. Customization is a ladder — config → tokens → CSS → eject a template — and ejects record provenance, so theme upgrades three-way-merge instead of silently stranding your copies.

Light and dark, properly. Token-driven, honors system preference, manual toggle wins, no flash of the wrong theme — and code blocks follow along at zero JS cost.

Agents are users too. Every command takes --json and returns structured results. cherry check verifies links, SEO, and schemas with machine-readable diagnostics. cherry schema posts --json tells an agent exactly what valid frontmatter is before it writes. New sites ship an AGENTS.md. Published sites emit llms.txt and a markdown mirror of every page — readable without scraping.

Host anywhere._site/ is plain files. GitHub Pages is first-class (generated Actions workflow, correct base-path handling for project pages, CNAME, .nojekyll) — Netlify, Cloudflare, S3, or rsync work just as well.

Hack it

A Cherry site is a thin Elixir project depending on the cherry package — so a "plugin" is just a module in your repo hooking a pipeline stage, and a framework upgrade is a version bump. Binary-mode sites (no mix.exs) extend via extensions/*.exs scripts and can graduate to a full mix project by adding one file.

Builds are deterministic by contract: same input, byte-identical output.

Status

v0.1.0-rc.3 is out: five release binaries with provenance attestation, the full authoring loop, the verifier, both themes, the portfolio/CV views, self-upgrade, and the agent skill. cherrybomb.dev is Cherry's own dogfood, built from example/ on every push. Cherry is built in the open, README-first: DESIGN.md is the constitution and docs/adr/ records the decisions. Next stop: stable 0.1.0.

License

Dual-licensed under MIT or Apache 2.0 — your choice. Contributions are accepted under the same dual license.

The CherryBomb brand assets (logo, mascot, wordmark, and their derivatives such as the favicon and og-card) are not covered by either license — they may not be reused as your own branding. See assets/LICENSE.