lingon

lingon

A minimal static site generator inspired by Middleman and Sprockets, compatible with some gulp plugins. The project is currently very experimental, use it for fun. Things will change.

Overview

This project is an attempt to port a subset of middleman to the node.js ecosystem. We are specifically targeting the features that are useful when building single page JS apps. If you already love middleman and Sprockets but want/need to use node.js, this might be interesting to you.

Namechange

This project was previously known as Orangejuice.
It is still very much alive, but with the new shiny name: Lingon.

Features

• Powered by node streams & compatible with many gulp plugins
• Sprockets-like "include" directive for file concatenation
• Use Gulp plugins as Sprockets-like file processors
• Built in http server (rebuilds files on browser refresh, no flaky fs watch).
• Out of the box support for: less and ejs
• No DSL, the lingon.js file is JavaScript

How is it different from Gulp, Grunt, X?

Lingon favors convention over configuration. For example, Grunt & Gulp provides powerful API's for building very customized build scripts. This requires you to write a bit of code everytime you want your build system to do something new. Each step in the build pipeline is carefully orchestrated so every project becomes special. This means there's a lot of copy-pasta going on when starting something new.

Lingon is inspired by Sprockets and uses a convention approach: A set of simple rules are used to determine what files to build, how to build them and where to put them. Files are processed bases on their filename extensions.

Example: "index.html.ejs" will be run through the EJS processor. These processors are gulp plugins, which allows us to leverage a large collection of great existing plugins. If you want to teach Lingon something new, you just have to define the mapping between a file ending and a gulp plugin. That's it!

Get it

# Locally in your project
``
npm install lingon # Or add lingon to your package.json file
``

Configure it

Your project should have a lingon.js file which is used to configure and run Lingon.

Here's a minimal lingon.js file with comments:

#!/usr/bin/env node

var lingon = require('lingon');

// The directory with your source tree, relative to the lingon.js file.
lingon.sourcePath = 'source';

// The directory you want to build to, relative to the lingon.js file.
lingon.buildPath = 'build';

Here's another lingon.js file that uses a gulp plugin to compile html files into the angular template cache. In this case the The files are named .html.ngt so we register the processor for the 'ngt' file ending.

#!/usr/bin/env node

var lingon = require('lingon');
var html2js = require('gulp-html2js');

lingon.sourcePath = 'source';
lingon.buildPath = 'build';

lingon.preProcessor('ngt', function() {
  return html2js({
    base: 'source'
  })
});

Run it

Make your lingon.js file executable
chmod +x lingon.js

Show help: 
./lingon.js -h

Build once and quit:
./lingon.js build

Start the server: 
./lingon.js

Start the server on a custom port:
./lingon.js server -p 1111

What about examples?

We've made an Angular.js template project that builds with Lingon.
It's the best reference to how Lingon works right now:

https://github.com/jpettersson/lingon-ng-template

Test it

Run the bats e2e tests:

./tests.sh

License

Licensed under the MIT license.

Changelog

Version 0.5.2

• Removed the lingon binary from this project and moved it to the lingon-cli package