mksite

Static site generator for creating simple sites with common Unix tools.

I created and develop it over time to mantain my personal website, not because there is no other tool with the same capabilities, but just for the sake of it, and to have something that does exactly and only what I need.

Altought the purpose is to generate simple HTML pages, the structure of the generator has grow somewhat complex to accomodate all the configurability and features currently suported.

Features

• Fully use Make dependency system
  • Only regenerates the needed files
  • Supports parallelism with make -jX
• Generates pages based on the file extension
  • .html -> Copies HTML as is
  • .md -> Uses a markdown processor
  • .sh/.awk/.py -> Uses the script output
  • .index -> Generates a site map from the current directory
  • Easly extensible for other types of files
• Generates page with the complete site map
• Includes CSS minifier
• Syntax highlighting for code blocks
• Macros to abstract the path and file extensions in links to other pages
• Support for generating an alternate (dark) theme site alongside
• Runs Make on the content directory to generate pages with dynamic content (like generating tags listings, and graphs with gnuplot from raw data)
• Default template produces very lightweight pages with no Javascript (my homepage is 5.34 KB)

Dependencies

The core dependencies are the following:

• GNU Make
  • Entry point to call the other scripts
• GNU Awk
  • Parsing and template file generation
• GNU m4
  • Macros for simple text replacement like internal URLs

This may work with Make or m4 other than the GNU ones, but was only tested with those. Awk must really be Gawk since the scripts use Gawk specific extensions.

Optional dependencies:

• cmark or other markdown parser
  • To generate HTML from .md files
• python3-bs4 (BeautifulSoup)
• python3-pygments
  • To generate syntax highlighted code

How to use

Start by testing the example site locally on the browser.

$ git clone git@github.com:Aparicio99/mksite.git
$ cd mksite
$ echo "BASE_URL = $PWD/site" > config.mk
$ make
$ $BROWSER site/index.html

For a more personalized site hosted on a web server, override the other defaults on the file config.mk.

Example for a site to be served from /var/www/webroot, on the domain root, and with pretty URLs without the .html extension:

SITE = /var/www/webroot
CONTENT = content_dir
SITE_NAME = Your site name
SITE_DESCRIPTION = Your description
EXT =
BASE_URL =

To also generate a alternate dark themed version of the site, set:

SITE_DARK = /var/www/webroot/dark
BASE_URL = /dark

And put this on the Nginx configuration server section:

index index.html;
try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
error_page 404 /404.html;
error_page 403 /403.html;

To use an alternative code syntax highlighting colors, run:

pygmentize -S <theme name> -f html -a .highlight > template/css/code.css