lingon

lingon

A minimal static site generator inspired by Middleman and Sprockets. Lingon is compatible with some gulp plugins.

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.

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

How is it different from Make, Gulp, Grunt, X?

Lingon favors convention over configuration. For example, Grunt & Gulp provide 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 based 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

Command line interface

Don't want to execute the lingon.js file directly? Would you prefer a cli?
Check out the experimental lingon-cli

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 lingon 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. Additionally JavaScript files will be post-processed by the uglify gulp plugin when executing the build task.

#!/usr/bin/env node

var lingon = require('lingon');
var ngHtml2js = require('lingon-ng-html2js');
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify');

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

// allowing the usage of directives (includes) in additional file types
lingon.validDirectiveFileTypes.push('.html', '.ngt');

// registering a processor in the short syntax (overwrites previous ones for the file type)
// long form would be: lingon.preProcessor('ngt').set(name, factory)
lingon.preProcessor('ngt', function() {
  return ngHtml2js({ base: 'source' })
});

// extending the processors for a file type and limiting it to files that does not contain ".min" in their path
lingon.postProcessor('js').add(/^((?!\.min).)*$/, function() {
  var processors = [];

  if(lingon.task == 'build') {
    processors.push(
      uglify({ outSourceMap: true })
    );
  }

  return processors;
});

Run it

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

Show help:
$ ./lingon.js -h

Build once and quit:
$ ./lingon.js build

Clean and build:
$ ./lingon.js clean 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 1.0.3

• Bug fix: The console output was showing absolute paths in server mode. Changed it back to relative paths.