Gostatic is a static site generator. It tracks file changes during compilation, which is why it works reasonably fast. Also it provides framework for configuration akin to Make, which makes it easy to understand and to write custom configurations.
Features include:
- No run-time dependencies, just a single binary - download it and run
- Dependency tracking and re-rendering only changed pages
- Markdown support - Commonmark via goldmark
- Simple config syntax
- Flexible filter system
- Support for pagination
- Plays well with external commands and scripts
- HTTP server and watcher (instant rendering on changes)
- Suitable for automation (ability to query state with
gostatic --dump
)
And all in all, it works nicely for me, so it may work for you!
If you're Go user and want to install this from source, you know what to do (go get
it).
In other case, download a binary from releases page - which also serves as CHANGELOG.
If you need to automate downloading latest release, I use this script (change
64-linux
to the type you need):
URL=$(curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/piranha/gostatic/releases | awk '/download_url.*64-linux/ { print $2; exit }')
curl -Lso gostatic $(URL)
chmod +x gostatic
Run gostatic -i my-site
to generate basic site in directory my-site
. It will
have a basic config
file, which you should edit to put relevant variables at
the top - it also contains description of how files in your src
directory are
treated.
src
directory obviously contains sources of your site (name of this directory
can be changed in config
). You can follow general idea of this directory to
create new blog posts or new pages. All files, which are not mentioned in
config
, are just copied over. Run gostatic -fv config
to see how your src
is processed.
site.tmpl
is a file that defines templates your are able to use for your
pages. You can see those templates mentioned in config
.
And, finally, there is a Makefile
, just for convenience. Run make
to build
your site once or make w
to run watcher and server, to see your site changes
in real time.
Also, you could look at my site for an example of advanced usage.
Good luck! And remember, your contributions either to gostatic or to
documentation (even if it's just this README.md
) are always very welcome!
- Approach
- Speed
- External Resources
- Configuration
- Page Config
- Processors
- Template API Reference
- Extensibility
Also, see wiki - and feel free to add more information there!
Each given file is processed through a pipeline of filters, which modify the file state and then rendered on disk. Single input file corresponds to a single output file, but filters can generate virtual input files (like tag files).
File is rendering in those cases:
- output file does not exists
- file source is newer than it's output
- one of those is the case for one of file's dependencies
All files are sorted by date. This date is taken in their config or, in case if date in config is absent or dates there are equal, by file modification time.
On 2015 MacBook Air (i7 2.2, 8 GB RAM, SSD) it takes 0.45s
to generate a site
of 630 pages (0.18s
for 250 pages, seems to be linear), 0.1s
to check there
are no modifications and 0.16s
to re-render a single changed page (along with
index and tag pages, coming to 93 pages in total).
Also note that if you're using various external post-processors (like uglifyjs
or sassc) they tend to slow down things a bit (for my specific use case both
uglifyjs and sassc add another 0.25s
when files they process change).
To reproduce numbers, download hyperfine, download gostatic, clone
solovyov.net, comment out :uglifyjs
and :sassc
in config
and then run:
hyperfine 'gostatic -f config'
hyperfine 'gostatic config'
hyperfine 'touch src/blog/2017/fuji-raw.md && gostatic config'
- Jack Pearkes made a Heroku buildpack for gostatic.
Config syntax is Makefile-inspired with some simplifications, look at the example:
TEMPLATES = site.tmpl templates-folder
SOURCE = src
OUTPUT = site
# this is a comment
*.md:
config
ext .html
directorify
tags tags/*.tag
markdown
template page # yeah, this is a comment as well
index.md: blog/*.md
config
ext .html
inner-template
markdown
template page
*.tag: blog/*.md
ext .html
directorify
template tag
markdown
template page
Here we have constants declaration (first three lines), a comment and then three rules. One for any markdown file, one specifically for index.md and one for generated tags.
Specific rules override generic matching rules, but logic is not exactly very smart, and there is no real precedence defined, so if you have several matches for a single file you could end up with any of them. Note that there is some order: exact path match, exact name match, glob path match, glob name match. NOTE: this may change in future.
Rules consist of path/match, list of dependencies (also paths and matches, the ones listed after colon) and commands.
Each command consists of a name of processor and (possibly) some arguments. Arguments are separated by spaces.
Note: if a file has no rules whatsoever, it will be copied to exactly same location at destination as it was in source without being read into memory. So heavy images etc shouldn't be a problem.
There are three configuration constants:
SOURCE
- sources to read (relative to location of config)OUTPUT
- directory for output (relative to location of config)TEMPLATES
- list of files and/or directories (containing*.tmpl
files), which will be parsed as Go templates. Each file can contain more than one template (see docs on that).
You can also use arbitrary names for constants to
access later from templates - just use any other name
(AUTHOR
could be one).
All constants can also be accessed from the config itself, using
$(CONSTANT_NAME)
syntax, just like in Makefile
.
Page config is only processed if you specify config
processor for a page. It's
format is name: value
, for example:
title: This is a page
tags: test
date: 2013-01-05
Parsed properties:
title
- page title.tags
- list of tags, separated by,
.date
- page date, could be used for blog. Accepts formats from bigger to smaller (from"2006-01-02 15:04:05 -07"
to"2006-01-02"
)hide
- false if not specified or is one off
,false
,False
,FALSE
. True in other cases. Hides page from children and tag lists when true.
You can also define any other property you like, it's value will be treated as a
string and it's key is capitalized and put on the .Other
page property.
You can always check list of available processors with gostatic --processors
.
-
config
- reads config from content. Config should be in format "name: value" and separated by four dashes on empty line (----
) from content. -
ignore
- ignore file. -
rename <new-name>
- rename a file tonew-name
. Note this does not change path to a file (you can use..
, though, but be careful about platform differences). Ifnew-name
contains*
, then it'll be replaced with content of*
from path match. For example, withblog/*.md: rename ../blog-*.html
this will renameblog/one.html
toblog-one.html
. -
ext <.ext>
- change file extension to a given one (which should be prefixed with a dot). -
datefilename
- rename a file fromwhatever/2021-02-08-name.html
towhatever/name.html
and set thepage.Date
to2021-02-08
. -
directorify
- rename a file fromwhatever/name.html
towhatever/name/index.html
. -
markdown
- process content as Markdown. -
inner-template
- process content as Go template. -
template <name>
- pass page to a template named<name>
. -
tags <path-pattern>
- create a virtual page for all tags of a current page. This tag page has path formed by replacing*
in<path-pattern>
with a tag name and has a tag as its.Title
(use{{ range .Site.Pages.WithTag .Title }}...{{end}}
to get a list of tagged pages. -
relativize
- change all urls archored at/
to be relative (i.e. add appropriate amount of../
) so that generated content can be deployed in a subfolder of a site. -
external <command> <args...>
- call external command with content of a page as stdin and using stdout as a new content of a page. Has a shortcut::<command> <args...>
(:
is replaced withexternal
). -
paginate <n> <path-pattern>
- create a virtual page for eachn
of pages (grouped bypath-pattern
, so you can paginate few groups of pages as a single one).path-pattern
has*
replaced by an index of this virtual page (1-based), and you can get a list of pages with{{ range paginator .}}...{{end}}
(see paginator function). Usingpaginate
with the samepath-pattern
on different types of pages will group them in same paginated list (request: please open an issue if you have an idea how to phrase this better). -
jekyllify
- creating pages in jekyll style, for example, the page2018-02-02-name.md
will be converted to/2018/02/02/name.md
. -
yaml
- read the configuration for the page using yaml format (like jekyll).
Templating is provided using Go templates. See link for documentation on syntax.
Each template is executed in context of a page. This means it
has certain properties and methods it can output or call to generate content,
i.e. {{ .Content }}
will output page content in place.
Go template system provides some convenient functions, and gostatic expands on that a bit:
-
changed <name> <value>
- checks if value has changed since previous call with the same name. Storage used for checking is global over the whole run of gostatic, so choose unique names for different places. -
cut <begin> <end> <value>
- cut partial content from<value>
, delimited by regular expressions<begin>
and<end>
. -
hash <value>
- return 32-bit hash of a given value. -
version <page> <path>
- return relative URL to a page with resulting path<path>
with?v=<32-bit hash>
appended (use to override cache settings for static files). -
truncate <length> <value>
- truncate string to given length (if it's longer). -
strip_html <value>
- remove all HTML tags from string. -
strip_newlines <value>
- remove all line breaks and newlines from string. -
replace <old> <new> <value>
- replace all occurrences ofold
withnew
invalue
. -
replacen <old> <new> <n> <value>
- same as above, but onlyn
times. -
replacere <pattern> <replacement> <value>
- replace text invalue
according to regexppattern
andreplacement
. -
split <separator> <value>
- split string by separator, generating an array (you can userange
with result of this function). -
contains <needle> <value>
- check if a stringvalue
containsneedle
. -
starts <needle> <value>
- check if a stringvalue
starts withneedle
. -
ends <needle> <value>
- check if a stringvalue
ends withneedle
. -
matches <pattern> <value>
- check if a regexppattern
matches stringvalue
. -
refind <pattern> <value>
- apply regexppattern
to a stringvalue
and return first submatch (the thing in parentheses), if any, or a whole matched string. -
markdown <value>
- convert a string (value
) from Markdown to HTML. -
paginator <page>
- get a paginator object for current page (only works on pages created bypaginate
processor). -
exec <cmd> [<arg1> <arg2> ....]
- exec a command with (optional) arguments. -
exectext <cmd> [<arg1> <arg2> ....] <text>
- exec a command with (optional) arguments and last argument (presumably some text) bound to command's stdin. If you need to do something hard, use it like{{ exectext "sh" "-c" "pipe | line" .Content }}
. -
excerpt <text> <maxWordCount>
- Gets an excerpt from the given text, to a maximum ofmaxWordCount
words. When the text is shortened, it will produce an[...]
string, denoting there's more. For example,The quick brown fox
withmaxWordCount
of 2 will result inThe quick [...]
. -
even <n>
- tests ifn
is divisible by 2. -
odd <n>
- tests ifn
is not divisible by 2. -
count <text>
- returns a number of words in text. -
reading_time <text>
- returns reading time based on average reading speed being 200. -
some <x> <x> <x>....
- returns first non-nil value as a string -
dir <path>
- returns all but the last element of a path (same as filepath.Dir) -
base <path>
- returns the last element of a path (same as filepath.Base)
.Site
- global site object..Rule
- rule object, matched by page..Pattern
- pattern, which matched this page..Deps
- list of pages, which are dependencies for this page..Next
- next page in a list of all site pages (use specific PageSlice's.Next
method if you need more precise matching)..Prev
- previous page in a list of all site pages (use specific PageSlice's.Prev
method if you need more precise matching).
.Source
- relative path to page source..FullPath
- full path to page source..Path
- relative path to page destination..OutputPath
- full path to page destination..ModTime
- page last modification time.
.Title
- page title..Tags
- list of page tags..Date
- page date, as defined in page config..Hide
- boolean if page is going to be absent from{{ .Children }}
or{{ .WithTag }}
lists..Other
- map of all other properties (capitalized) from page config, like{{ .Other.Author }}
.
.Raw
- page content after preprocessors (i.e. afterconfig
has stripped it part), that was originally read from the disk..Content
- page content..Url
- page url (i.e..Path
, but withindex.html
stripped from the end)..Name
- page name (i.e. last part of.Url
)..UrlTo <other-page>
- relative url from current to some other page..Rel <url>
- relative url to given absolute (anchored at/
) url..Is <url>
- checks if page is at passed url (or path) - use it for marking active elements in menu, for example..UrlMatches <pattern>
- checks if page url matches regular expression<pattern>
..Has <field> <value>
- backend for.Where
and.WhereNot
, checks if field equals to value, or:"Url"
- callsUrlMatches
"Tag"
- checks tag is present in.Tags
"Source"
- matches source path forvalue
.
.Number
- number of paginator page, first is 1.PathPattern
- whatever was passed aspath-pattern
topaginate
(processor)[#processors].Page
- paginator's own page.Pages
- list of pages.Prev
- previous paginator object (if current is first, thennil
).Next
- next paginator object (if current is last, thennil
)
.Get <n>
- page number<n>
..First
- first page..Last
- last page..Len
- length of page list..Prev <page>
- return page with earlier date than given. Returns nil if no earlier pages exist or page is not in page list..Next <page>
- return page with later date than given. Returns nil if no later pages exist or page is not in page list..Slice <from> <to>
- return pages fromfrom
toto
(i.e. from 0 to 10).
.Children <prefix>
- list of pages, nested under<prefix>
..WithTag <tag-name>
- list of pages, tagged with<tag-name>
..Reverse
- list of pages, sorted in reverse order.
.BySource <path>
- finds a page with source path<path>
..ByPath <path>
- finds a page with resulting path<path>
..GlobSource <pattern>
- list of pages, matching source path<pattern>
..Where <field> <value>
- list of pages, which returntrue
for.Has <field> <value>
.WhereNot <field> <value>
- list of pages, which returnfalse
for.Has <field> <value>
.Pages
- list of all pages..Source
- path to site source..Output
- path to site destination..Templates
- list of template files used for the site..Other
- any other properties (capitalized) defined in site config.
Obviously, the easiest way to extend gostatic's functionality is to use
external
processor. It makes you able to process files in the
way you want, but is more or less limited to that. There is no API right now to
create pages on the fly (like tags
processor does) using this method, for
example.
But gostatic
itself is a
library, and you can
write your own static site generator using this library. See
gostatic.go for
an example of one.