Show HN: Dory – A Simple Static Site Generator for MDX Docs

(github.com)

7 points by clidey 18 hours ago

3 comments

I'm Hemang, co-founder of Clidey. While building Docucod – our platform for generating and maintaining technical documentation – we needed a simple, fast, and flexible way to host the docs.

We started with Next.js + Vercel, but it felt like overkill. SSR wasn’t needed, and we ran into vague webhook errors and deployment issues. It felt like too much complexity for a static documentation site.

So we built Dory – a minimal static site generator optimized for technical documentation. It's built with Preact, Vite, Tailwind, FontAwesome, Mermaid, and Typescript.

What makes Dory work for us: • Reads a folder of .mdx files • A single dory.json defines structure/layout • No SSR, no cloud lock-in • Fast builds, minimal config, deploy anywhere

The goal with Dory is to keep things truly simple — easy to set up, easy to use, and effortless to deploy for anyone building static documentation. Its design is inspired by great tools like Gitbook, Docusaurus, Readme, Mintlify, and Read the Docs. While we plan to add more features over time, simplicity will remain the core principle.

Once it becomes a bit more stable, we'll do a proper comparison to see load times, bundle size, all the good stuff.

It’s early (beta!), but it’s working well for us, and we’d love feedback from the community.

Repo: ⁦https://github.com/clidey/dory

Thanks for checking it out!

MarcoDewey 15 hours ago

Finally, someone who gets that SSR is overkill. I just want a simple static documentation page.

  • clidey 13 hours ago

    Absolutely! SSR has great purposes but we want to focus on being super light for this particular use case!

modelorona 17 hours ago

Other co-founder here, happy to answer any questions in the comments! :)