balrog

Hi!

I'm exercising my mind by making a static site generator just like I want it. There are many (list, list) already out there. This isn't to compete, this is just some self sufficency and some weekend JavaScripting fun times.

Basics

• Written in the pure, classic and elegant language JavaScript, using Node.js.
• Uses Handlebars for templating.
• No front matter. Ability to leave blog posts in pure markdown format, for easy printing and linking-to/reading/downloading.
• Post metadata is parsed from the common post headers (below), just make sure your lines coorelate and tags are separated with commas (you can have any varient of markdown header hashes):

# Title
### Author
### Date
### Tags

Hi this is a post. So pancake.

• Site metadata and template designation happens in config.json. You can link files or directories to a template.

Get Running

git clone https://github.com/jlord/balrog.git
cd balrog

Edit config.json then make some posts and stuff.

npm run build

Then you'll have your static files and RSS feed. Woo!

If you want to run a test server to try out your site, you can do

npm run server

and if you want to build & run at the same time you can do

npm start

Structure

• root you can put .html or .md files in the root directory. These are for the purpose of pages such as about, contact and whatnots. All .html and .md files will be parsed except for readme.md for now.
• assets folder to contain subfolders for css, imgs or js. All of its contents are copied directly to the final site folder.
• posts place your markdown post/blog files here. No spaces in the filename.
• shared contains your template partials/includes such as header or footer HTML files.
• templates contains your main template/layout files written in HTML and containing at least {{content}} but can also contain partials/includes such as {{> header}} which will include a header.html file from the shared folder.
• node_modules holds all the nodes.
• site this is the folder generated by the program and what will contain the static files for the site (place them on a gh-pages branch for a live website). It will have assets and blog as its subfolders, other pages will be in its root.

Other Files

• config.json a .JSON file with site meta data in it and template designations. You can link files or directories to a template.

{
  "site_route": "/site",
  "site_url": "http://www.site.com/",
  "site_title": "cool pizza",
  "site_description": "wow",
  "site_author": "helloworld",
  "icon": "icon.png",
  "ignores": ["license, readme"],
  "templates": {
    "flat-page": ["about", "contact", "index"],
    "single-post": ["/posts/*.md"]
  }
}

• index.html you'll want at least this in your root directory.
• rss.xml is generated afresh when you run node index.js
• license, readme.md docs
• index.js, meta,js the main files for executing all this stuff. meta.js generates the metadata and RSS.

Future

For now, if you want to host this on GitHub Pages you'll have to copy the generated site folder into a branch named gh-pages. I'm planning on getting it going on Heroku or such and will need to create a little server doodad. I'll also probably generate some JSON for all the post data so that I can do other nifty stuff with it.