Getting Started with Zola

Tutorials

Building a static website doesn't have to be complicated. With Zola, you get a fast, modern static site generator that's simple to use and powerful enough for complex projects.

Why Zola?

Zola is a static site generator written in Rust, which means it's incredibly fast. Unlike other generators that require a runtime environment, Zola compiles everything into static HTML files that you can deploy anywhere.

Key Features

Fast compilation - Built with Rust for speed
No dependencies - Single binary, no runtime needed
SASS support - Built-in SASS compilation
Syntax highlighting - Code highlighting out of the box
Taxonomies - Built-in support for tags and categories
Shortcodes - Reusable content snippets
Tera templates - Powerful templating engine

Getting Started

Installation is straightforward. On Windows, you can use Chocolatey, Scoop, or download the binary directly.

# With Chocolatey
choco install zola

# With Scoop
scoop install zola

Once installed, create a new site:

zola init my-blog
cd my-blog
zola serve

That's it! Your site is now running at http://127.0.0.1:1111.

Building Your First Page

Zola uses Markdown for content. Create a file in the content directory:

+++
title = "My First Post"
date = 2025-11-05
+++

# Hello World

This is my first blog post using Zola!

The front matter (between +++) contains metadata about your page, while the rest is standard Markdown that gets rendered as HTML.

Themes

One of the best parts about Zola is the theme ecosystem. You can use themes like Ametrine to get a beautiful site up and running quickly. Simply download a theme and configure it in your config.toml:

theme = "ametrine"

Deployment

When you're ready to deploy, build your site:

zola build

This creates a public directory with all your static files. You can deploy this to Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, or any static hosting service.

Have you tried Zola? What's your favorite static site generator? Let me know in the comments or reach out on GitHub!