Show HN: Tropical, a Vite-powered “islands architecture” static site generator (opens in new tab)

I rejigged my little static site generator, swapping out a bunch of custom Webpack stuff for Vite.

Vite does a lot more out of the box, and its dev server approach is so fast, but there’s still a bunch of stuff to wire up to make a real website (SSR/prerendering, Storybook with its new Vite builder, MDX, layouts, pages, a feed, a client bootstrapping/hydrating approach, etc). That’s what I’ve wrapped up into Tropical.

This looks great! I've been building my personal page with markdown files, pandoc, and a Makefile. But then I started building other stuff with vite and I've been idly looking for a way to build everything all together — still using markdown for static text, but also have custom JS for my portfolio pieces. Very excited to try this out.