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v.01 manual
2/18/2018
snkt is a static site generator focused on simplicity and efficiency.
snkt does a few things, but strives to do them coherently.
snkt generates my personal web site of ~2000 articles in under a second. It should be fast enough to completely regenerate even very large sites in near real-time if needed.
Every 5-10 years I throw out the software for my site and rewrite it.
This time it’s in Go. Maybe you’ll find it useful. It’s 10x faster than the old version in Python.
It powers trenchant.org but is under active development and pieces may change. See TODO for future / in progress work.
The only dependency for building is go.
Install Go for your platform.
Download and build snkt with something like
$ go get adammathes.com/snkt
This will download dependencies, build snkt and place it in your $GOPATH/bin (by default, ~/go/bin/).
snkt is a self-contained binary, you can move it anywhere.
Use the “-init” option to create the skeleton for a new site -
$ snkt -i myblog
This will create:
txt directory for postshtml directory for HTML outputtmpl directory for templates
base HTML structure wrapperarchive lists all postspost single post pagehome home page with recent postsrss RSS 2.0config.yml configuration fileA one line plaint text file is a valid post.
user@host:~/myblog$ echo "hello world" >> txt/hi
Build the site
$ snkt -b
Output should now be in the html directory and look like
html
hi/index.html hello world postindex.htmlarchive.htmlrss.xmlsnkt includes a simple web server to view the results with
$ snkt -p
Visiting http://localhost:8000 in a web browser should now show the site and the first post.
You can now copy this HTML anywhere and you’re set.
Usage of snkt:
-b, --build
generates site from input files and templates
-c, --config configuration
configuration file (default "config.yml")
-h, --help
print usage information
-i, --init directory
initialize new site at directory
-s, --serve
serve site via integrated HTTP server
-v, --verbose
log operations during build to STDOUT
-w, --watch
watch configured input text dir, rebuild on changes
Examples
$ snkt -c site.yaml -b
$ snkt --config=myconfig.yml -v -w
Per site configuration is via a YAML file.
For most purposes, it should just be a listing of attribute : value
Configuration options --
| name | value | default |
|---|---|---|
input_dir |
absolute path of directory for text input files | |
output_dir |
absolute path of directory for html output files | |
tmpl_dir |
absolute path of directory for template files | |
site_title |
string for the site’s title | |
site_url |
absolute URL for the site | |
filters |
list of search/replace regex’s to run on posts | |
permalink_fmt |
format string for permalinks | /%F/ |
post_file_fmt |
format string for post filenames | /%F/index.html |
show_future |
include posts with dates in the future | false |
preview_server |
host:port to spawn the preview server | localhost:8000 |
preview_dir |
root directory of preview server | output_dir |
Post inputs are stored as plain text files. (I have only tested UTF-8 and ASCII.)
Posts have an optional metadata preamble, and a markdown formatted body. The preamble is just a series of name value pairings separated by a colon (:) character.
Minimal complete and valid post --
this is a totally valid post
Post with a preamble --
title: also a valid post
date: 2017-02-08
valid: totes
This post will have an explicitly set title (ooh! fancy!)
instead of inferred from the filename.
It will also have an explicitly set date instead of inferring
it from the file creation/modification time.
`totes` will be stored in the post's `meta` map under `valid.`
You don't have to worry about that right now. Honest.
Templates use the standard library Go text/template.
Entities in the templates --
Site
Title string
URL string
Posts array of posts
See site/site.go for more.
Post
// Metadata
Meta map[string]string
SourceFile string
Title string
Permalink string
Time time.Time
Year int
Month time.Month
Day int
InFuture bool
// Content text -- raw, unprocessed, unfiltered markdown
Text string
// Content text -- processed into HTML via markdown and other filters
Content string
// Content with sources and references resolved to absolute URLs
AbsoluteContent string
// Post following chronologically (later)
Next *Post
// Post preceding chronologically (earlier)
Prev *Post
// Precomputed dates as strings
Date string
RssDate string
Displays recent posts and rendered to index.html in the output_dir.
Each individual post uses this template
Lists all posts, showing only titles and links. Rendered to archive.html
Displays recent posts as RSS 2.0 XML. Rendered to rss.xml
Permalinks (URLs for individual posts) can be customized.
| String | Value | Example |
|---|---|---|
| %Y | Year | 2017 |
| %M | Month | 04 |
| %D | Day | 14 |
| %F | Filename | foo |
| %T | Title | bar |
Filename is a cleaned version of the post’s original filename with the extension removed. Filenames and titles will be “cleaned” of characters unsuitable for links, with whitespace replaced by -.
Arbitrary regular expressions can be executed on each post to create domain-specific and site-specific modifications.
Here are the real world examples of regular expressions that filter each post on my personal site -
filters:
- s: <photo id="(.+)">
r: <div class="photo"><img src="/img/$1" /></div>
- s: <segue />
r: <p class="segue">· · ·</p>
- s: <youtube id="(.+)">
r: <p class="video"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1"><img src="/img/$1.jpg" /></a></p>
- s: "amazon:(.+)"
r: "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/$1/decommodify-20/"
These features are working but less documented and potentially still in progress and subject to change.
If a template named paged is present then paged archives (15 posts per page) are created at output_dir/page/%d.html
Template variables are the same as the archive template, but with .NextPage and .PrevPage as integers of the next and previous page.
See archive/paged.go for details.
There is preliminary support for tag style metadata per post.
Add a “tags” field to your post preamble. Tags should be comma separated.
tags: TagOne, tag two, a third tag, fourth
Tags will be normalized to lowercase, with spaces replaced with underscores. So the above would have tagged a post with --
tagone tag_two a_third_tag fourth
Tags are accessible in each post via the Tags field.
To create pages by tag, create a template named tags.
This creates a file at OUTPUT_DIR/tag/tag_name/index.html for each tag.
It will have access to the same variables as an archive template with the additional .Tag for the tag name.
Preliminary support to treat binary files as standalone posts.
Drop image files with “jpg” or other image extensions into the “txt” dir.
Video and audio files have preliminary support too -- see post/post.go
not done
also not done
Pull requests and issues are welcomed at https://github.com/adammathes/snkt