A fast, drop-in replacement for Jekyll, written in Rust.

rustkyll reads the same source files as Jekyll - Markdown with YAML front matter, Liquid templates, YAML data files, collections - and usually produces equivalent HTML output much faster.

uvx rustkyll serve

Run this in any Jekyll site directory. That's it.

Tested on 50+ Jekyll sites. Fresh benchmark run on 2026-04-02. Here are some highlights:

Median wall-clock time over 3 runs, clean builds, no caching. Full results in docs/benchmark/results.md.

uvx rustkyll build --source /path/to/site

# Or install globally
uv tool install rustkyll

pip install rustkyll

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexeygrigorev/rustkyll/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Installs the latest release into ~/.local/bin. Override with environment variables:

RUSTKYLL_VERSION=v0.4.5 RUSTKYLL_INSTALL_DIR=~/bin \
  curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alexeygrigorev/rustkyll/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Download from GitHub Releases:

git clone https://github.com/alexeygrigorev/rustkyll.git
cd rustkyll
cargo build --release

rustkyll build --source /path/to/site --destination /path/to/output

Flags:

• --source - path to Jekyll site directory (default: .)
• --destination - output directory (default: _site)
• --incremental - only rebuild changed pages
• --force - force full rebuild, ignoring incremental manifest

rustkyll serve --source /path/to/site --port 4000

Starts a local dev server with live reload. Flags:

• --port - HTTP server port (default: 4000)
• --livereload / --no-livereload - toggle browser auto-refresh (default: on)
• --no-browser - don't auto-open browser

138 of 166 Jekyll features are fully implemented, with 7 more partially implemented. See docs/jekyll-compatibility.md for the full matrix.

Core:

• Config parsing, front matter, Markdown (GFM)
• Layouts with inheritance, includes with parameters
• Permalinks (named styles and custom patterns)
• Sass/SCSS compilation, static file copying
• YAML and JSON data files
• Excerpts

Collections:

• Posts, custom collections, pagination
• Categories, tags, page.previous/page.next
• site.categories, site.tags, site.related_posts, site.pages

Liquid:

• All standard tags: for, if, unless, case, capture, assign, raw, comment, highlight, tablerow, cycle, increment/decrement
• Jekyll-specific tags: link, post_url, seo, avatar, feed_meta
• 70+ filters including where, where_exp, group_by, group_by_exp, markdownify, slugify, jsonify, relative_url, absolute_url, sample, cgi_escape, uri_escape, and all Liquid stdlib filters

Plugins (built-in):

• jekyll-seo-tag, jekyll-feed, jekyll-sitemap, jekyll-paginate, jekyll-avatar, jekyll-archives, jekyll-redirect-from

Extras:

• Parallel page generation with rayon
• Live reload via WebSocket
• Progress bar and build timing breakdown
• Lenient template rendering (unknown filters warn instead of failing)

• No gem-based themes. Themes must be present as local layout/include files.
• No Ruby plugin system. Only the built-in plugin equivalents listed above are supported.
• No CSV/TSV data files. Only YAML and JSON are loaded.
• Incremental builds don't track layout/include changes. Use --force after modifying layouts.
• Syntax highlighting classes may differ slightly from Rouge (Jekyll uses Rouge, rustkyll uses syntect).

rustkyll was developed entirely by AI agents - a Product Manager, Software Engineer, and Tester - collaborating through a structured pipeline. See docs/PROCESS.md for details.

This project is not yet published under a specific license. See the repository for updates.