Static Gen

A static site generator built with Ruby.

How to use:

1. 🌀 Clone the repo at https://github.com/twhite96/static-gen-ruby.git or with GitHub CLI gh repo clone twhite96/static-gen-ruby
2. 🏃 Run: bundle to install dependencies.
3. 🎊 Have fun with it.

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Motivation for this app

I wanted to show that I could build something, even if it was small, on my own, with little guidance.

Ben Halpern started a thread about his generator on DEV and I took his scaffold and ran with it.

🥞 Stack

Ruby and ruby-handlebars

👊🏽 Wins

Just getting the script running is a win for me, as I am not a Ruby dev at all.

😐 Difficulties

Ruby is a whole other animal compared to JavaScript and React. No semicolons, defining different methods (Ruby is class based, so there are more methods than functions in this instance), etc. I spent a whole month stuck on what this method did:

build_string = base_html
  .gsub("{{ head }}", "#{page_partial}")
  .gsub("{{ seo }}", seo_html)
  .gsub("{{ main }}", main_css)
  .gsub("{{ dev }}", dev_html)

I figured out it was just generating strings in the files I passed to the .gsub method.

There were others, and I plan on writing a full blog post.

🚶‍♂️Next steps

Not much. I wanted it to be a full on blog generator but will need to sit on that for a bit.

⚡ Refactor ⚡

Maybe DRYing it up a bit, but I like what I have, especially for a v1.

📘 Further reading

You can read it here: Building a Static Site Generator with Ruby.

✅ TODOs

• Finish reading Mustache docs
• Figure out if you want to publish a gem
• Figure out if you want to let the user create posts as YAML using this example: mustache/projects.mustache at 9fefaabd2b1e68ef8186a210af1f0e18ef48bb55 · mustache/mustache · GitHub and mustache/projects.yml at 9fefaabd2b1e68ef8186a210af1f0e18ef48bb55 · mustache/mustache · GitHub
• Learn more about publishing gems
• Learn more about bundler
• Write tests and mocks to see if the class renders the Mustache html template
• Decide if more classes and templates are necessary

UPDATE:

Further progress on the project on my blog.

Update on my static site generator

Mustache Fix for my static site generator