Roots is a toolkit built on best practices for advanced front-end web development. It has a very large number of features, which I’ll attempt to list below. Roots comes in the form of a static site build tool by default, but also includes templates and plugins for express and rails.

• extremely simple installation
• clean and minimal default project template
• clean and intuitive app settings file
• jade, stylus, and coffeescript default stack
• easy to add languages with a simple and well-documented plugin interface
• super fast live reload implementation
• compile errors displayed as a flash message, doesn’t break workflow
• layouts and partials fully supported
• coffeescript and markdown can be written directly in views
• global variables and functions (view helpers)
• extremely robust, modular, and powerful css helper library built in
• single command deploy to heroku, nodejitsu, or github pages
• intelligently minifies html, css, and js on deploy
• efficient client-side js management through bower and require.js
• automatically precompiles jade templates for use in client-side MVCs like backbone
• use dynamic content to create collections, blogs, etc
• compile a single file for multiple languages