Baku

Baku is a simple, Markdown-based blogging engine/static website generator. Baku is the spiritual successor to Tinkerer.

Getting started

Install Baku from PyPI:

pip install baku

Set up your blog:

md blog
cd blog
baku --init

Update the newly generated blog.cfg file to configure your blog. For example, you can update the style key from light.css to dark.css for dark mode.

Posting

Create a new post using the command line -p or --post argument:

baku --post "This is my first post"

This will generate a new Markdown file under a path representing today's date. For example if today were September 1st, 2022, you would see the following new file: 2022/09/01/this-is-my-first-post.md.

Date can be overriden with the --date argument:

baku --post "This is my first post" --date 2022/09/01

Will explicitly set the date to September 1st, 2022.

Build

Build your blog using the --build command:

baku --build

This will generate the static blog website under the html folder. You can publish this, for example using GitHub Pages

Upgrading

If you upgrade to a newer Baku version, navigate to your blog root and run:

baku --upgrade

This will update your blog.cfg with additional settings if any, and prompt you in case templates or static files changed. These are files under your blog's templates/ and static/ folders. If you didn't edit these yourself, you can safely overwrite with the newer version. If you did make some changes to tweak the appearance of your blog, choose the backup option - the upgrade will preserve backups then you can merge back your customizations.

Drafts

You can create a draft using the -d or --draft argument:

baku --draft "This is my draft"

This will create drafts/this-is-my-draft.md. Drafts are ignored during build.

You can promote a draft to a post by passing an existing draft to the --post command:

baku --post drafts/this-is-my-draft.md

This will move the file from drafts to today's date. Similarly, you can turn a post into a draft by passing an existing post to the --draft command:

baku --draft 2022/09/01/this-is-my-first-post.md

This will move the post from 2022/09/01 to the drafts folder.

Directory layout

When you initialize a new blog, Baku will create a couple of directories: templates and static.

The static directory contains a default icon for the website and a couple of CSS files. The content of this directory is copied to the build directory.

In fact, all files that are not .md files and that are not under root, templates or drafts are copied to the build directory.

The build directory is html and it gets cleaned up with each build.

Templates

The templates directory contains the HTML templates used for building posts and index.html. Baku uses a custom, simple templating engine to avoid dependencies. Variables between {{ and }} are evaluated as follows:

• {{ if <expr> }} is a conditional expression which needs a matching {{ endif }}. During template rendering, Baku will evaluate <expr>. If the result is truthy, the text and expressions until {{ endif }} will be evaluated, otherwise they will be skipped.

• {{ for <expr> }} is a loop expression which needs a matching {{ endfor }}. During template rendering, Baku will iterate over the result of evaluating <expr> and will repeatedly evaluate the text and expressions until {{ endfor }} for each item in the result. A $item representing the result item will be available in the context.

• All other expressions are evaluated as references to values in the context (e.g. {{ a.b.c }}). A & after an expression HTML-escapes the value (e.g. {{ a.b.c & }} will HTML-escape a.b.c). A % followed by a format string will apply date formatting to the value using strftime() (e.g. {{ a.b.c % %B %d %Y }}).

The context used during post rendering includes all values in blog.cfg. When rendering posts, the context includes a post variable with various post data. When rendering the index, the context includes years, each year containing a year value and a list of posts (posts).