Rspress, the Rsbuild-based static site generator designed for developer documentation, has released version 2.0 with a comprehensive set of changes spanning theme design, build performance, AI integration and developer experience improvements. The release, which landed on January 30th 2026, follows 144 releases across the 1.x lifecycle and contributions from 125 developers.
Rspress 2.0 introduces a redesigned default theme crafted by designer Zovn Wei, offering four tiers of customisation. Developers can adjust CSS variables for quick theming, target BEM class names for precise style overrides, use ESM re-exports to swap individual components, or eject components entirely for full control. The BEM approach is a deliberate choice to decouple from any specific CSS framework, allowing teams to freely use Tailwind, Less, or Sass without version conflicts.
One of the more forward-looking additions is the Static Site Generation to Markdown (SSG-MD) feature, a new rendering mode that generates Markdown files and llms.txt output from documentation sites. Rather than converting HTML back to Markdown, which often produces poor results, SSG-MD renders content through the React virtual DOM to produce high-quality Markdown suitable for AI agents. Enabling it requires a single configuration line:
import { defineConfig } from '@rspress/core';
export default defineConfig({
llms: true,
});
Build performance sees significant gains through two features enabled by default: lazy compilation and persistent caching. With lazy compilation, pages are only compiled when visited during development, reducing cold start times from seconds to as low as 50 milliseconds according to benchmarks shared by the Rspress team on GitHub. A route preloading strategy triggers compilation on link hover, keeping navigation seamless. Persistent caching reuses previous compilation results, improving subsequent build speeds by 30% to 60%.
Code highlighting has moved from Prism to Shiki by default, performing syntax highlighting at build time rather than runtime. This brings accurate VS Code-consistent highlighting based on TextMate grammar, on-demand language imports with no runtime overhead, and support for custom transformers such as twoslash for inline type hints.
The release also consolidates the package structure. Multiple packages including rspress, @rspress/runtime, @rspress/shared, and @rspress/theme-default have been merged into a single @rspress/core package.
Eearly reactions to the release have been positive, with one user commenting on the r/Rspack subreddit:
I love to see this kind of tooling popup! Congrats on the launch!
The GitHub discussions thread tracking breaking changes has seen active engagement, with 26 comments and 19 replies covering migration details from Shiki configuration to React Router compatibility.
Compared to alternatives like Docusaurus and VitePress, Rspress differentiates primarily on build speed through its Rspack foundation and its AI-native features. Docusaurus itself acknowledges that Rspress benefits from a modern infrastructure that enables faster site builds
while noting its own strengths in maturity and community size. VitePress remains the go-to for Vue-based projects, whereas Rspress targets the React ecosystem.
Rspress 2.0 requires Node.js 20 or higher and supports React 18 and 19. The Rust-based MDX parser (@rspress/mdx-rs) has been dropped in favour of the JavaScript MDX parser, trading some raw compilation speed for better ecosystem compatibility with tools like Shiki and custom remark and rehype plugins. A detailed migration guide is available for teams upgrading from 1.x.
Rspress is an open-source static site generator built on Rsbuild and Rspack, part of the broader Rstack JavaScript toolchain. It is designed for building documentation sites with MDX support, convention-based routing, and component library previews, and integrates with Rslib for component library documentation workflows.
