Aurora

Aurora is a minimalist, blog-aware static site generator. It only provides the absolute minimum required to render your Markdown and Jinja templates to a complete website. Aurora is designed for people who want control over their content; your site, your rules.

Quick help:

Aurora - a minimalist, blog-aware static site generator

usage:
    aurora create <project_name>
    aurora new <post_title>
    aurora build

options:
    -h --help  Show this screen.
    --version  Show version.

Installation

Install with pip. Note that only Python 3 is supported.

$ pip3 install aurora

Quick start

We will create a very simple blog in this section. Use the create command to scaffold a new directory containing an empty Aurora site.

$ aurora create <project_name>

There are two primary content type in Aurora: pages and posts. Pages are for standalone content such as the home or about page while posts are for blogging.

cd into the directory and add a new post with the new command (name your post in kebab-case, eg hello-world).

$ cd <project_name>
$ aurora new <post_title>

A new markdown file under the /posts directory will be created. The filename includes the current date and the post title, for example 2019-04-29-hello-world.md. The top of the file is a block of YAML frontmatter, the metadata for your post.

Add some content to your post below the frontmatter. Aurora only supports content written in the Markdown format for now.

---
title: Hello world
---

*Oh, what a day… What a lovely day!* - Nux

Now we can add a blog index to the homepage. Open the /pages/index.html file and add the following in-between the {% block content %} and {% endblock %} tags.

<h2>Posts</h2>

<ol>
{% for _, post in posts.items() %}
    <a href="{{ post.url }}"><li>{{ post.title }}</li></a>
{% endfor %}
</ol>

Aurora uses the Jinja templating engine for compile-time logic. The {% ... %} tags expresses control flow while {{ ... }} are variables.

Finally, build your website with

$ aurora build

The generated output can be found under the newly created /dist directory. You can deploy the site using any methods you prefer. For local development, simply run

$ python3 -m http.server

and visit http://0.0.0.0:8000 to preview your work.