About

About Nift

Nift is an open-source, dependency-aware website templating and build system. It is designed to add a small amount of build-time structure without replacing the rest of the web stack.

Nift started as nifty-site-manager and has been developed around a deliberately narrow idea: websites already have HTML, CSS, JavaScript, backend languages, databases, deployment platforms and specialist tools. A build tool does not need to absorb those ecosystems to be useful. Nift focuses on tracked outputs, templates and partials, checked project paths, structured data, project contracts, and fast dependency-aware rebuilding.

The result can be a conventional pre-rendered website, documentation, generated text assets, or the frontend of a fully dynamic application backed by Go, Node, PHP, serverless functions or another runtime. Nift is build-time glue rather than an application runtime.

The project is open source under the MIT licence. Source, releases, issues and development history are published on GitHub. The Why Nift? page explains the design philosophy in more detail, while Battle Tested documents the evidence and boundaries behind the project’s reliability claims.