Hexo

Hexo is a fast, simple blog framework powered by Node.js. It outputs a fully static site to public/ by default. pageflare integrates as a post-build step via npm scripts.

Install

npm install -D @pageflare/cli

Usage

Chain pageflare after hexo generate in your npm scripts:

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "hexo generate && pageflare public/ --in-place"
  }
}

Or run directly:

hexo generate && pageflare public/ --in-place

Configuration

Create a pageflare.jsonc in your project root:

{
  "minify_html": true,
  "minify_css": true,
  "minify_js": true,
  "js_defer": true,
  "lazy_images": true,
  "img_dimensions": true,
  "font_swap": true,
  "preconnect_hints": true
}

What pageflare Adds

Hexo has optional minification plugins (hexo-html-minifier, hexo-clean-css), but they only cover basic minification. pageflare adds:

HTML, CSS, and JS minification
Lazy loading and image dimension inference
JavaScript defer and loader injection
Font display swap and self-hosting
Preconnect hints for third-party origins
Critical CSS extraction (Pro)
Responsive image srcset generation (Pro)

If you already use Hexo minification plugins, you can disable pageflare’s minification and keep the other optimizations:

{
  "minify_html": false,
  "minify_css": false,
  "minify_js": false
}

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions

- name: Build Hexo
  run: npx hexo generate

- name: Optimize with pageflare
  uses: getappz/pageflare-cli@v1
  with:
    args: "public/ --in-place"

Netlify

[build]
  command = "hexo generate && pageflare public/ --in-place --no-progress"
  publish = "public"

Vercel

{
  "buildCommand": "hexo generate && pageflare public/ --in-place --no-progress"
}

Replacing plugins

Hexo has npm-based plugins for optimization. After adding pageflare, you can remove:

Package	pageflare equivalent
`hexo-html-minifier`	HTML minification
`hexo-clean-css`	CSS minification
`hexo-uglify`	JS minification
`hexo-generator-sitemap`	Sitemap generation via `llm.sitemap` config
`hexo-lazyload-image`	Lazy loading with dimension inference

Pro License

Set the PAGEFLARE_LICENSE environment variable to unlock Pro optimizations:

PAGEFLARE_LICENSE=your-key npm run build

Deploying

Hexo static output works with any hosting provider:

Vercel — automatic Vercel Image Optimization
Netlify — automatic Netlify Image CDN
Cloudflare Pages — Cloudflare Image Resizing
Self-hosted — any static file server

Troubleshooting

pageflare processes 0 files Verify Hexo finished generating — use hexo generate (not hexo server). The output directory is public/ by default, configurable via public_dir in _config.yml.

Theme assets not optimized Make sure theme assets are copied to public/ during generation. Some themes use CDN-hosted assets that pageflare cannot process locally.

Slow builds on large blogs For blogs with thousands of posts, run with --log info to see per-phase timing. Use --force in CI to skip incremental caching.