Thank you for your interest in Soda-Fountain, a static site build system that is based on Gulp, Metalsmith and assorted plugins. Soda-Fountain is built with the following design principals in mind.
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Static build systems should be based on well documented, open source tools and technologies.
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Static build systems should provide you all the necessary tools to create a site from conception to deployment.
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Static build systems should be modular, allowing you to add, remove and configure components as you see fit.
To achieve these goals Soda-Fountain makes ample use of Gulp, the most popular and well documented streaming build system on the web and Metalsmith, a rising star in the world of Static Site Generators. Both tools provide a rich ecosystem of plugins that makes creating the website you want a breeze.
With Soda-Fountain and a little know-how, it's possible to create anything from simple blogs and portfolios to larger, data-driven sites that resemble a more traditional CMS.
In order to install Soda-Fountain you must have two packages already installed and running on your system:
- Node.js
- Gulp
Warning: Soda-Fountain is not supported on Windows.
For Mac users, installing Node.js is easy. Just go to the Node.js website and download the package that's appropriate to your operating system of choice. For Ubuntu users the latest version of Node.js is available via PPA. See this article from Digital Ocean for details.
Once Node.js is installed, it's easy to install Gulp. Open your terminal emulator and enter:
sudo npm install -g gulp
You will be asked for your administrative password. Once your password is provided Node's package manager (npm) will download and install Gulp.
From the command-line enter:
git clone https://github.com/michaelkornblum/soda-fountain to clone Soda-Fountain to a local repository. Alternately Soda-Fountain can be downloaded as a zip file from here. Use your command-line or graphical front-end tool of choice to unzip the newly downloaded file before proceeding to the next step.
From the command-line change your current working directory so you inside the newly cloned repository or extracted zip file.
cd path/to/soda-fountain
Next use the Node Package Manager to download and intall the remaining dependencies. From the command-line enter:
sudo npm install
Once again, you will be asked for your administrative password and npm will download the packages needed to make Soda-Fountain work.
Note: Soda-Fountain uses over 35 Node packages in order to do its magic. As a result the downloading and installation of these dependencies may take some time. Please be patient.
Init.js is a small Node script that is based on inquirer.js. Its purpose is to provide soda-fountain with some basic information about your website. This information is saved in the site.json file located in your src/data directory. From the command-line, enter:
node init.js
Init.js will ask you a series of questions. Once these questions have been answered, init.js will output a brief congratulatory message indicating that the information you entered is ready for use.
Soda-Fountain is ready for its initial run. From the command-line, enter:
gulp serve
Soda-Fountain will use Gulp to run through a series of build and maintenance tasks. Finally it will start an instance of browser-sync, a live, cross-browser testing environment. Soda-Fountiain is now ready for use. Continue on to the next section to learn how to use it to create the site of your dreams.
A static site generator is a powerful software tool that builds websites without forcing the user to manually create a new HTML document for each webpage. To accomplish this goal, it will often separate a website's structure from its content. This separation of concerns helps the user to quickly add content to a site without needing to worry about the website's overall structure. Static site generators often consist of the following components:
- a Templating Engine
- a Markdown Parser
- a Compiler