Tropical
Fast static sites. Real HTML with islands. Built with React and Vite.
Nothing to init or configure. Just grab the template repo and start building.
Tropical is just Vite plus a flexible layer of familiar, industry-standard JS tools & conventions for building fast, component-based static HTML sites with islands of JS.
Features 🍹
- React for prerendered HTML & opt-in browser JS via island hydration or your own progressive enhancements
- Fela for fast atomic component styles without CSS files
- Vite and everything that comes with it, including a fast esbuild-powered HMR dev server, and a tree-shaken Rollup production build
- Ladle component stories
- Responsive images and sharp transformations
- MDX Markdown (GFM) with Prism syntax highlighting
- Pages, layouts, tags, collections, dates, tables of contents — all the conventions and metadata you need to build a real site or blog
- JSON Feeds
Tropical is just a template repo. You're not stuck with these features. If Vite can do it, so can your Tropical site!
🤔 Compare Tropical with Astro, îles and other Vite-powered static site builders.
Non-features 🙅♀️
Tropical starts from the idea that old-fashioned HTML with minimal browser JS is 🚀 blazing fast™, so it doesn't force you to adopt any of these:
- client-side route transitions
- lazy loading
- code splitting
- Progressive Web App™ and service workers
- full page hydration
- TypeScript
- GraphQL
If you do want those things, go nuts! Tropical is based on Vite's React preset so all Vite features are available. It's also very light on abstractions, so you can easily make it your own without fighting the framework.
No painful API churn 🤕
Once you mint a new site from the template repo, it's yours to make your own.
There's no Tropical package to update to a new version. Instead, releases provide guides for updating dependencies and conventions at your own pace, without any Big Bang version upgrades that make you rewrite everything just to get that one new feature.
Get started
Read the docs or get the template repo on GitHub
Who built this?
Hi there! I'm Ben, I've been building websites and industrial-strength static site tooling for a while now. I've used the internet in enough far-flung places to have some pragmatic opinions about which web performance strategies really matter.