Zorto is the AI-native static site generator (SSG) inspired by Zola and Quarto.

Built for AI and agents #

Zorto is designed from the ground up for agentic software engineering. AI can create a full website in minutes and maintain it with ease: the config-driven architecture, built-in themes, and opinionated linting make it natural for both humans and agents to work with.

More on AI-native workflows coming soon as we approach v1.

Executable code blocks #

Zorto’s defining feature. Fenced code blocks marked with {python} or {bash} run at build time:

echo "This ran at $(date +%Y-%m-%d)"

This ran at 2026-05-17

The output is rendered inline. This powers self-updating documentation: our CLI reference runs zorto --help at build time, so the docs are always current.

Built-in themes #

Zorto ships with 16 built-in themes including zorto, dkdc, default, ember, forest, ocean, rose, slate, and more. Set theme = "dkdc" in config.toml and you get a complete site: navbar, footer, theme toggle, responsive design.

All themes support light/dark mode toggling. Override any template or SCSS variable locally; your files always win.

GitHub-style callouts #

Write callouts with standard GitHub alert syntax:

Tip

Zorto renders these natively using pulldown-cmark’s GFM support. No shortcode needed.

Five types: NOTE, TIP, WARNING, CAUTION, IMPORTANT.

Shortcodes #

Nineteen built-in shortcodes, spanning content (include, tabs, note, details, figure, youtube, gist, mermaid), diagrams (flow, layers, tree, compare, cascade), API references (pyref, configref), and presentations (slide_image, speaker_notes, fragment, columns). Plus you can create your own with Tera templates.

Template linting #

zorto check warns about hardcoded strings in templates, inspired by clippy. User-facing text belongs in config.toml or content files, not in HTML templates. This keeps themes reusable.

llms.txt #

Zorto generates llms.txt and llms-full.txt by default: structured text files that help LLMs understand your site. This is enabled out of the box; set generate_llms_txt = false in config.toml to disable.

What’s next #

We’re working toward v1 with more built-in themes, support for additional languages in executable code blocks (beyond Python and Bash), and broader visualization support. More on all of that soon.

Free and open source #

Zorto is MIT-licensed: free and open source forever. We may consider dual-licensing with Apache 2.0 in the future; open an issue if that would be useful for your project.

Install #

curl -LsSf https://dkdc.sh/zorto/install.sh | sh

Or via crates.io / PyPI.

Check out the getting started guide, or browse the source on GitHub.