Firn

A Static Site Generator for Org Mode

   

Overview

Firn generates a static site from org-mode files. It is a bit different from other static site generators, in that it intends to be a drop in solution for creating sites from already existing folders of org-files. Further, because org-mode has great capacity for collecting and displaying different kinds of data (links, logbooks, drawers, task keywords, tags) we can make this data available when org-content is parsed into a data structure.

Currently, running the firn binary on a directory of org files performs the following:

• Reads all .org files in the directory recursively.
• Parses org-files into data structures with Orgize.
• Collects all file links and logbooks across all files.
• Passes files through a template system with Hiccup, and renders to HTML.

Quickstart

1. Download the latest release (only Mac and Linux currently supported), or use the below code snippet to install:

   curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/theiceshelf/firn/master/install -o install-firn
   chmod +x install-firn && ./install-firn
   # you may need to run the install script with sudo and/or run it with the absolute PWD path:
   # sudo ~/<path-to-script>/install-firn
       

2. Navigate to your directory of org files
3. Run firn new
4. Run firn serve
5. Run firn build when ready to put your site online!

Usage

The Firn documentation is available here and is mirrored and built from the docs/ folder in this repo.

Firn - A static-site generator for org-mode.

Usage: firn [options] action

Options:
  -p, --port PORT  4000                            Port number
  -h, --help
  -v, --version
  -r, --repl
  -d, --dir PATH   /Users/tees/Projects/firn/firn  Absolute path of directory to build/serve

Actions:
  build    Build a static site in a directory with org files.
  new      Scaffold files and folders needed to start a new site.
  serve    Runs a development server for processed org files.

Docker

Firn can also be used in Docker.

docker run -it --rm -p 4000:4000 -v "$PWD":"$PWD" --workdir "$PWD" theiceshelf/firn --help

I do not use docker commonly, so please do not rely on this image being always up to date.

Development

Prerequisites:

• Download GraalVM and set GRAALVM_HOME.
• Use gu to install the native-image executable.
• Install Clojure + lein
• Install Rust + cargo (we use 1.51.0)

Building

Clojure Repl + Local Rust Binary

1. Run make install

Final Binary

This creates a single binary called firn. (Not recommended for local development).

git clone git@github.com:theiceshelf/firn.git && cd firn
# compile Rust, Clojure and the GraalVM Native Image.
bin/compile

Container image

Firn can be built as a container image, using

docker build -t theiceshelf/firn .

Note: I personally do not use this method, so I cannot confirm that this works / will always work.

Recommended Development Flow

Firn is a Clojure code base that reaches out to a library compiled with Rust. Note: While you don’t have to install Rust, as we vendor the Rust binaries in =clojure/resources=, these may not always be up to date.

This is my personal workflow for developing, it may or may not be useful.

• I open core.clj and boot up a Cider REPL in Emacs.
• I eval the CLI functions (new, serve, build) in core.clj under the (comment ..) block at the end of the file.
• When building a feature, I write the code, evaluate it, and then eval the CLI commands again in core.clj. I use cider-eval-region to both stop mount (if the server is running) and to re-run the CLI command.
• I usually run the tests on the docs folder that is bundled in the repo:
  • (mount/stop) (-main "serve" "-d" "<path_to_repo>/firn/docs")
• In emacs, I use m-x setenv and at the prompt enter DEV for name and it’s value to TRUE
  • this prevents CLI exit codes from ending the REPL process.
• While developing, any org-parsing happens by having Clojure code shells out to the dev-parser specific to your systems architecture..
• If you need to make changes to the rust dev-parser, you can re-build the binary by running make dev-parser in the repo root..

Thank-you’s

• PoiScript’s org-mode parser.
• Thank you to @borkdude for building some awesome libraries (sci is used in firn to evaluate layouts) and for answering questions about compiling with GraalVM and for figuring out how to compile rust and clojure together.