Ehundu 1.0, the first stable release

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Bilbao, Spain, 2 November 2026

Paigar releases version 1.0 of Ehundu, the open-source static site generator written in PHP that can build a site from the command line and also from a web process, on ordinary shared hosting. 1.0 is the first stable release: from it on, the project format is a promise, not a draft.

What Ehundu is¶

Ehundu takes a folder with content in Markdown, data in YAML and Twig templates, and produces a plain-HTML site that can be hosted on any server. It runs on PHP 8.4 or later, needs no external programs or unusual extensions, and installs with Composer (composer require ehundu/ehundu) or as a single file, ehundu.phar. It is released under the MIT licence.

Why another generator¶

The best-known static site generators are designed to run from the command line, on a developer's computer or in a continuous-integration service. Ehundu was born from a different need: building also from a web process, within the time and resource limits of ordinary PHP hosting. That way an editing tool can save a change and publish the site right away, and whoever prefers a text editor and a terminal gets exactly the same result.

What 1.0 means¶

Within major version 1, Ehundu promises not to change three things and only to extend them: the project format, declared with formato: 1; the ehundu console command; and the short part of the PHP library that the project documents. Removing something or changing what it means will take a new major version, and whatever is about to stop working will be announced for at least one minor version first. 1.0 changes nothing Ehundu already did: it is version 0.16 plus three decisions, with the contract no longer a draft.

Before the release, the engine built twenty-six real sites, and twenty-five of them produced exactly the same files as with the previous version. The showcase on ehundu.com lists seventeen sites built with Ehundu: business websites, clinics, restaurants and a personal notebook of almost three hundred pages.

What it does¶

It builds multilingual sites, produces PDFs of the pages that ask for them, generates a page for every tag, splits long lists into pages, publishes entries on their date and withdraws them on another (publicar and publicarHasta, the latter new in 1.0), links CSS and JavaScript with a fingerprint of their content, and remembers what it has built so as to redo only what a change affects. It uploads the site to a folder, over FTP or SFTP, or to S3-compatible storage, sending only what has changed. To get started there are eight starters, which are project templates: minimal, blog, documentation, portfolio, local business, multilingual, event and CV.

In Spanish, on purpose¶

Ehundu's format is in Spanish: folders are called contenido, plantillas or publico, and front matter fields titulo, fecha or etiquetas. It is a deliberate decision, because the Spanish-speaking community that builds for the web is huge and deserves tools designed in its own language. The usual English names are also accepted, to make migrating from Eleventy or Lume easier.

“I wanted to be able to edit a site and publish it right away, on the usual hosting, without setting anything else up. As I could not find a generator designed for that, I wrote one. 1.0 is the promise that what builds today will keep building.”

Juanjo, author of Ehundu

Where to get it¶

Ehundu 1.0 has been available since 2 November on GitHub (opens in a new tab), on Packagist (opens in a new tab) and at ehundu.com, where the documentation, the showcase and the starters are. The logo, the illustrations and the texts to copy are on the Press page.

About Ehundu¶

Ehundu is Basque for “to weave”. It is a free-software project of Paigar (opens in a new tab), released under the MIT licence. Its logo is an “e” made from the thread of a needle, and its mascot, Nidel, is a dog who was in a haystack the day Juanjo adopted him.

Press contact: ehundu@paigar.eu, or the contact form.