Metal with care

MetalSmith-Demo

A working static site generator using MetalSmith.

Why does this repo exist?

I was able to ramp up quickly thanks to Robin Thrift's getting-to-know-metalsmith series.

A lot of credit for this repo is owed to Robin Thrift who created the tutorials I followed and created the original MetalSmith-Demo, though under a different name: metalsmith-tutorial

With that said, I ran into a few issues during setup and the tutorial for part 1 (from April 2014) was outdated. I am just starting to toy around with MetalSmith, but I figured I would create this as a starter project to help myself, and others like me, to Metal with care.

Issues I ran into with Robin's tutorials

• Part 1

  1. the MetalSmith.build() method must be passed an error and/or success callback (this is up to date on the main MetalSmith README.md).

• Part 2

  1. After completing adding of all of the instructions from Part 2, the build failed. I was missing a post.hbt file (There is a subtext in Part2 mentioning that you need to also create a post template that I missed while blindly following the large-text instructions.)
  2. The index.md no longer builds to an index.html.. leaving only a directory listing when serving the build directory. I took way too long finding this out: the tutorials are on much much older npm packages, and with the current packages as of FEB 16 2015, you must set permalink: false, in any files you want to be carried over from src to build without manipulation.
  3. The blog/index.html page was displaying incorrectly escaped content for posts due to using double, instead of triple, curly brackets.

• Part 3

  1. No real issues

Observed issues with MetalSmith

1. Why U No Error when build fails? Why you DO success? If a success function is passed to .build(), it fires during the failed builds mentioned above. This is quite confusing.

How do I even?

Dependencies

1. git
2. node
3. npm

Installation

git clone git@github.com:SgtPooki/MetalSmith-Demo.git destinationDirectory
cd destinationDirectory
npm install
node index

Serving the site

npm run metal # Build the site
npm start # Calls' npm run metal' and then http-server to serve the files.

Future

This project needs us to

• Create a slush generator.
• Create a yo generator.
• Add multiple server options for serving the static modules (but then what would I do with my What Now section...?)
• Add support for vhost middleware so this project can be added to any other site with a connect based server easily.
• Add watch support so we can rebuild without rerunning the npm start command.

I don't like http-server...

Just a few other options off the top of my head:

• Node.js with connect
• Node.js with express
• Apache
• nginx
• SimpleHTTPServer

What now? (after installation...)

if,

• you have not received any errors
• you used the installation commands above
• you have a projectRoot/build/pages/about/index.html and similar files
• You can serve those files with npm start

, then our work here is done. If not.. please see below.

But.. but...

If you're lost,

• please feel free to spend some time googling.
• email me with details about how you would like to bestow scrupulous funding upon me for my assistance.
• file an issue/question so I can address the cause of the installation commands above not correctly installing this project for you.

Pursue Truth; Share Knowledge; And have fun programming! 👍