SitePipe
Heads up! If you're reading this from the Hackage docs the links will be broken, go
read it on Github.
Contents:
What is it?
It's a simple to understand static site generator for making blogs, personal
websites, etc.
What's it look like?
Start by setting up the structure of your website in a site
folder:
site
├── templates
│ ├── post.html
│ └── index.html
└── posts
└── article.md
Here's a dead-simple blog generator using markdown posts, you can see it in action in
examples/starter-template, or build on it in the tutorial
{-# language OverloadedStrings #-}
module Main where
import SitePipe
main :: IO ()
main = site $ do
-- Load all the posts from site/posts/
posts <- resourceLoader markdownReader ["posts/*.md"]
-- Build up a context for our index page
let indexContext :: Value
indexContext = object [ "posts" .= posts
-- The url is where the index page will be written to
, "url" .= ("/index.html" :: String)
]
-- write out index page and posts via templates
writeTemplate "templates/index.html" [indexContext]
writeTemplate "templates/post.html" posts
Wait, another static site generator? What about Hakyll/Jekyll?
Yup, yet another static site generator. I've tried using Hakyll and Jekyll on
different occasions and found there was too much magic going on with all of the
monadic contexts for me to understand how to customize things for my use-cases.
Even adding simple tags/categories to my blog seemed far more complex then it
needed to be; Hakyll specifically got me really bogged down; what was the
Compiler
monad? How does an Item
work? How do I add a custom field? Why
couldn't I just edit data directly like I'm used to doing in Haskell? They
seemed a bit too opinionated without giving me escape hatches to wire in my own
functionality. If they're working for you, then great! But they weren't working
for me, so that's where SitePipe came from.
Getting Started
Quick Start
The easiest way to get started is to clone this repo and try out the examples in the
examples directory. There's a starter-template which is a barebones
starting point, and also a slightly more complex blog with tags and an rss feed.
You can build either of the examples using Stack
by cd
ing into the directory and running stack build && stack exec build-site
.
This creates a 'dist' folder with the results of the build. A quick way to serve
the site is to use Serve.
Serving a site with Serve:
npm install -g serve
serve dist
- Navigate to the port which is serving (usually http://localhost:3000)
Tutorial
Read the walkthrough of the system HERE; it'll run you through the basics
of how the system works and how to make your own customizations!
Concepts
How is SitePipe different from other solutions?
Instead of dealing with complex contexts SitePipe works with values. Values
are loaded from files and can be rendered into html. What happens to the values
in-between is up to you!
SitePipe provides a bunch of helpers for you, but at the end of the day you can
fit the pipes together however you like.
Metadata for posts and content is parsed from yaml into Aeson's Value
type; Aeson can
easily represent nested objects or lists inside your metadata, and there's a
rich ecosystem for working with Aeson types! You can load resources in as any
object which implements FromJSON
(or just leave them as Aeson Values) and you
have the option to edit the objects directly without worrying about monadic or
external context.
Templating
SitePipe has built-in support for Mustache
Templates, specifically Justus
Adam's implementation in
Haskell. This lets you use a well established templating system in your site,
complete with template functions, partials, and iteration. Since the underlying
data is based on It's clear how templates will behave since resources are based
on Aeson's JSON types.
Loaders
You can load resources in to work on them using a Loader
, A loader simply
finds and loads files into resources by employing a Reader
on some files. A
basic resourceLoader
loader is provided, which will load all of the files
matching a set of file-globs through the provided reader and will return an
Aeson Value containing the relevant metadata and content. You should be able to
use resourceLoader for most things by customizing the reader function which you
pass it.
Reader
A reader is a function of the type String -> IO String
; the input is the file
contents which remain after a yaml header has been stripped off (if it exists).
The most common reader is the provided markdownReader
which runs a markdown
document through pandoc's markdown processor and outputs html. You can write
your own readers if you like, either by making a function which operates over
the content of the document and matches String -> IO String
or by using
the provided Pandoc helpers (mkPandocReader
, mkPandocReaderWith
) which
allow you to use any of Pandoc's provided document formats, and optionally specify
transformations over the pandoc document before it is rendered to html or some other
output format.
Writers
Writers take a list of resources (anything with a ToJSON instance, often an
Aeson Value) and will write them to the output where the static site will be.
The most common writer is writeTemplate
which will render the given resource
through a given template, but you can also use textWriter
, or write your own
writer; either writing to disk using liftIO
or by using the provided
writeWith
combinator which given a transformation from a resource to a String
(a -> SiteM String)
will write the result of the transformation to the place
specified by the resource's url.
Loader/Writers
Some things don't fit into the previous categories. For example copyFiles
and
copyFilesWith
are simple tools which just copy the specified files over as-is
into the output directory. You pass either of them a list of file globs and the
resulting files will be copied over. copyFiles
sends them to the same
relative filepath from the source directory to the output directory, while
copyFilesWith
allows you to transform the filepath to specify a new location
for each file.
Utilities
Sitepipe includes a few utilities which simply make working with sites easier.
The included utilities will expand as time goes on.
Issues/Troubleshooting
Feel free to file an issue if you run into any trouble,
or come ask in the Chatroom