Rspress 1.0 – A High‑Performance Static Site Generator Powered by Rust and Rspack

Framework Positioning

Rspress is a static site generator incubated by ByteDance’s Web Infra team. It uses Rspack for building, renders with React, supports MDX content, and emphasizes high performance, ease of use, and strong customizability.

Project Background

The project originated as an internal documentation tool, focusing on build performance, MDX support, core documentation capabilities (i18n, multi‑version, search, component library docs), and extensibility via a plugin system.

Build Performance

Rspress achieves fast startup and build times by employing a Rust‑based toolchain for two performance‑critical parts: the frontend bundler (Rspack) and the Markdown compiler ( @rspress/mdx-rs ), delivering 5‑10× faster bundling and up to 20× faster markdown compilation compared to typical JavaScript solutions. Additional optimizations include theme pre‑bundling and style pre‑generation.

MDX Support

MDX enables component‑driven documentation, allowing reuse of document fragments and embedding arbitrary React components directly within markdown files.

Core Documentation Features

Automatic layout generation (navigation bar, sidebar, outline)

Static site generation with direct HTML output

Internationalization (i18n) support

Full‑text search powered by FlexSearch

Multi‑version documentation management

Customizable themes (declarative via _meta.json or programmatic via config)

Component demo preview and real‑time playground via official plugins

Extensibility

Rspress provides a plugin mechanism that can extend both the Node side and the browser runtime, supporting markdown/MDX compilation plugins, custom routes, global components, and Rspack plugins. Most webpack plugins are compatible thanks to Rspack’s compatibility layer.

Quick Start

# npm
npm create rspress@latest
# yarn
yarn create rspress@latest
# pnpm
pnpm create rspress@latest
# bun
bun create rspress@latest

npm run dev

Future Roadmap

Enhance core capabilities based on community feedback

Complete missing mdx‑rs features (e.g., preview and playground support)

Expand default theme offerings and encourage community contributions

Introduce more official plugins such as BackTop, Google Analytics, Sitemap, PWA, and client redirects

Continue performance monitoring and testing to maintain a high‑quality developer experience

Acknowledgements

Rspress draws inspiration from projects like VitePress, VuePress, Nextra, mdxjs‑rs, NAPI‑RS, and Dumi, and thanks the open‑source community for their contributions.