webhull

A fast, config-driven web server for multilingual, SEO-optimised websites. Single binary, zero runtime dependencies.

What it is

webhull serves complete, production-ready websites from YAML configuration and HTML content files. No database, no admin UI, no CMS runtime. One binary, one config file.

• Multilingual — i18n built in, hreflang generated automatically
• SEO-first — sitemap, canonical URLs, Open Graph, JSON-LD, per-page meta overrides
• Fast — O(1) slug lookup, in-process templ rendering, gzip, ETag, content-hash cache busting
• GDPR by design — consent banner, first-party analytics proxy, no external CDN calls in default config
• Access gate — optional code-based protection for the full site or a specific path
• Contact form — built-in SMTP dispatch with spam filtering and rate limiting
• Distroless container — under 20 MB, no shell, no runtime overhead

For Coding Agents

webhull ships a Pi Skill — load it and build production-ready sites without additional explanation.

skills/webhull/
├── SKILL.md                   # Quickstart, rules, enforcement gate
└── references/
    ├── CONFIG.md              # Full pages.yaml + config.yaml reference
    ├── PATTERNS.md            # Copy-paste configs for 4 site types
    └── WORKFLOW.md            # Step-by-step: empty dir → deployed site

See AGENTS.md for general coding-agent guidance.

Quickstart

# Build
git clone https://github.com/layer87-labs/webhull.git
cd webhull
make build

# Run the example site
./build/bin/webhull -config example/site.yaml
# → open http://localhost:8080

Configuration

All configuration lives in a single YAML file with ${VAR:default} env-var expansion:

site:
  name: "My Site"
  baseURL: "${BASE_URL:http://localhost:8080}"

i18n:
  defaultLanguage: "en"
  languages: ["en", "de"]

contentDir: "content"

server:
  port: "${PORT:8080}"
  environment: "${ENVIRONMENT:development}"
  staticDir: "static"
  staticCacheMaxAge: 8760h

Content files are HTML with YAML frontmatter:

---
id: home
template: home
title: "Home"
seo_title: "My Site — Tagline"
startPage: true
heroLine1: "Hello,"
heroLine2: "world."
heroCTA1Text: "Get started"
heroCTA1Link: "/docs"
---

<!-- section[block]: What we do -->
<p>Body content here.</p>

Documentation

Full documentation at labs.layer87.de/docs/webhull:

• Quickstart
• Configuration reference
• Content authoring
• Templates
• SEO
• Access Gate
• Deployment

Container image

FROM ghcr.io/layer87-labs/webhull:latest

COPY pages.yaml .
COPY content ./content
COPY static ./static

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.

Maintained by Layer87.