Groovy Authoring for Static Sites (GRASS)

A simple script inspired by Rizzo and Octopress for generating static sites and blogs with Groovy.

Usage:

groovy GRASS.groovy -s source -d destination

Getting Started

The first thing you need for a GRASS powered site is a site-config.groovy file. This file contains some of the constants that will be used in the packaged templates and to override default configurations. Below is a minimalist site-config.groovy file.

site {
	title = "Some Guy's Blog"
	subtitle = ""
	author = "Some Guy"
	email = "someguy@gmail.com"
	url = "http://someguyblogs.com"
	twitter = "https://twitter.com/someguy"
	github = "https://github.com/someguy"
}

As you create your own templates and modify the included ones, feel free to add whatever constants you desire to this file.

Creating a post

A blog post in GRASS takes the general form of a Markdown document with a couple of extras.

<%
	title 'Introducing GRASS'
	tag 'Technology', 'Groovy', 'GRASS'
%>
My text here 
<!-- more -->
More text here. Link to [something][1]

[1]: http://example.com

In the sample GRASS post listed above, the nonstandard bits are a code block marked by <% %> containing the title and tags and an HTML comment <!-- more -->. Everything else is standard Markdown. The code block is used by GRASS to make the title header and by several plugins related to tags:

• the tags plugin, which generates a listing of all posts, and,
• the feeds plugin, which generates an Atom feed of all posts with a given tag.

The <!-- more --> comment tells the summarizer plugin how much of the post to include in index page and Atom feed summaries. If it is omitted, the full post shows on all pages.

Blog site structure

The default structure of a blog is as follows(with a few example post files). Posts should be titled YYYY-DD-MM-Name-with-underscores.md. This file name is used for the permalink. If the plugin and template directories don't exist, GRASS will use its packaged versions.

/my-blog-site
|-- plugins
|-- posts
|   |-- 2014-01-01-now-on-GRASS.md
|   |-- 2013-08-08-introducing-GRASS.md
|   |-- 2013-08-13-first-GRASS-plugin.md
|-- site-config.groovy
`-- templates
    `-- <overrided templates here>

Configuring Your Site

global-config.groovy sets all the default paths for a GRASS site. Any of these values can be overriden in site-config.groovy. The current version of global-config.groovy` is listed below.

paths {
	pages = ['pages']
	posts = ['posts']
	assets = ['assets/files', 'assets/css', 'assets/js', 'assets/images']
	plugins = ['plugins']
	templates = ['templates']
}

plugins {
	enabled = [] // add plugin names to whitelist, if empty all plugins loaded
	disabled = [] // add plugin names to blacklist specific plugins
}

// plugin-specific config
plugin {
	links {
		dispatch = ['page', 'url']
	}
}

Using Plugins

GRASS looks for plugins in the location specified either in your global-config.groovy file or what you overrode it with in your site-config.groovy file. GRASS searches for plugins relative to the current directory where GRASS is installed AND the source directory of your project. You can however give it multiple locations to search, be it absolute or relative paths.

Selectively Applying Plugins

As shown in global-config.groovy, it is possible to selectively enable or disable plugins. To do so, pass in the class name of the plugin. If I wanted to disable the feeds plugin, I would add the following to my site-config.groovy file:

plugins.disabled = ['FeedPlugin']

TODO Customizing Templates