lingon

lingon

Lingon is a minimal "static site generator" with a focus on developer happiness.

Overview

Lingon is a tool for building static web apps. Our thesis is: following a few conventions is better than writing a lot of configuration. We've borrowed this idea from middleman and Sprockets. If you already know these tools you'll feel right at home with Lingon.

Under the hood we use Gulp plugins to do the heavy lifting, leveraging an existing community of great plugins.

Key features

• Minimal, does not ship with bloat.
• Sprockets-like "include" directive for file concatenation
• Uses 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, EJS & Markdown
• No DSL - Lingon is configured using plain JavaScript

Install

Add "lingon" to your package.json or:

$ npm install lingon

Prepare your project

Create a "lingon.js" file in the root of the project and make it executable:

$ chmod +x lingon.js

This file is used to both configure and run Lingon. This is where you define which plugins to use and how they should interact. The most basic valid "lingon.js" file looks like this:

var lingon = require("lingon");

This will allow Lingon to build and serve a basic web applications. By default, Lingon will look for source files in ./source and put build files in ./build. These defaults can be changed like this:

var lingon = require("lingon");

lingon.sourcePath = "/some/other/path";
lingon.buildPath = "/dev/null";

Check out the usage documentation for a walkthrough of all features.

Run Lingon

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

Documentation

Usage examples

API Reference

Project templates

Angular.js application

How does it relate to 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!

Test it

Run the bats e2e tests:

$ ./tests.sh

Contributions

We'd love some help!
Take a look at our CONTRIBUTING.md file for guidelines.

License

Licensed under the MIT license.