Static Site Generator - A Python program to covert markdowns into a static website. ♽

Static sites are very popular in the real world for blogs and other content-heavy websites because they're lightning-fast, secure, and easy to host.

Architecture 🏛️

The flow of data through the full system:

1. Markdown files are in the /content directory. A template.html file is in the root of the project.
2. The static site generator (the Python code in src/) reads the Markdown files and the template file.
3. The generator converts the Markdown files to a final HTML file for each page and writes them to the /public directory.
4. Start the built-in Python HTTP server (a separate program, unrelated to the generator) to serve the contents of the /public directory on http://localhost:8888 (our local machine).
5. We open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:8888 to view the rendered site.

How the SSG work 🧑‍🍳

The vast majority of our coding will happen in the src/ directory because almost all of the work is done in steps 2 and 3 above. Here's a rough outline of what the final program will do when it runs:

1. Delete everything in the /public directory.
2. Copy any static assets (HTML template, images, CSS, etc.) to the /public directory.
3. Generate an HTML file for each Markdown file in the /content directory. For each Markdown file:
   1. Open the file and read its contents.
   2. Split the markdown into "blocks" (e.g. paragraphs, headings, lists, etc.).
   3. Convert each block into a tree of HTMLNode objects. For inline elements (like bold text, links, etc.) we will convert: Raw markdown -> TextNode -> HTMLNode
   4. Join all the HTMLNode blocks under one large parent HTMLNode for the pages.
   5. Use a recursive to_html() method to convert the HTMLNode and all its nested nodes to a giant HTML string and inject it in the HTML template.
   6. Write the full HTML string to a file for that page in the /public directory.

Run the program:

All run commands are in ./main.sh. Feel free to change as you edit the code.

./main.sh

Edit/run test cases:

The program comes with various test cases. In your terminal, run:

./test.sh