Announcing the Saga CLI

Saga is a static site generator written in Swift, and it just got a lot easier to get started with. Saga now has a companion CLI tool with three commands: saga init, saga build, and saga dev.

Installation

You can install the CLI system-wide via Homebrew:

$ brew install loopwerk/tap/saga

Or via Mint:

$ mint install loopwerk/Saga

Getting started

Once installed, scaffolding a new project is a single command:

$ saga init mysite
$ cd mysite
$ saga dev

saga init gives you a complete project with articles, tags, templates, and a stylesheet, ready to build and serve. No need to set up a Package.swift by hand or figure out the right dependencies.

The dev server

saga dev watches your content and source folders, triggers a rebuild when a file changes, and live-reloads the browser. It works on both macOS and Linux, so developing or deploying on a Linux server is no problem.

Building for production

saga build compiles your site and writes the output, ready to deploy.

Why this matters

Saga has always been a code-first tool: no config files, no implicit behavior, no magic conventions. But that also meant the setup was entirely manual. The new CLI removes that friction. You can go from zero to a running site in seconds, while still having full control over the pipeline in Swift.

If you’re curious, I recently wrote a real-world comparison of Hugo, Publish, and Saga that goes into much more detail about how the three generators compare.