A simple static website generator, heavily inspired by sw & co
sws fills a niche that didn't really need to be filled: that of static website generators. It does so following the footsteps of sw and swx, but adding a simple plugin system for when some more complexity is required.
The base script (sws) behaves like sw, turning a nested folder structure containing markup files into something that can be viewed by a browser, but it can do more than that: it can be templated using a very simple syntax that allows for easy embedding of shell snippets, and sample plugins to handle blogs/simple wikis are included in the distribution.
It does everything with (mostly/hopefully) POSIX-sh-compliant shell scripts, sed, grep, awk and ed, and less than four hundred lines of code between the core script and plugins. As for the why - I wanted something simple, but not quite as simple as sw, and I was in the mood for some shell scripting and wheel re-inventing.
sws does not need to be installed. It can be copied/symlinked into a directory somewhere in $PATH, but it'll work just fine by slapping it somewhere Make (or whatever is been used to invoke it) can find it.
$ sws SOURCE DESTINATIONAfter loading _config, generating the templates and loading the contents of the _plugins directory (if any), sws will go through each file in SOURCE and either copy them or convert them to HTML to put them in the DESTINATION directory.
This can be automated - especially when dealing with multiple sub-sites with their own plugins - by putting the calls in a Makefile.
sws supports a very simple syntax for metadata, in the style of the refer troff preprocessor. Metadata fields are single-line, and begin with a percent sign (%) immediately followed by an uppercase letter, a space, and some data.
Conventionally, the following meanings have been assigned to the various letters, and they are used by sws for the same purpose:
%T: title of the work;%A: author;%D: date of publication;%K: keywords/tags, space-separated;%X: summary.
sws can be configured by setting environment variables, either by exporting them or by adding them to the _config file of the source directory. It uses the following variables:
MARKDOWN: path to/command to convert markdown source into HTML.find_opts_preandfind_opts_post: options to be passed to thefindcommand tasked with finding all the files to parse inside the source directory.head_tmpl,foot_tmplandplugins_foldr: paths pointing at the_headerand_footerfiles, or_pluginsdirectory, if they are not contained within the same directory as the_configfile.
sws uses a very simple templating system, processing files with an awk script to turn them into shell functions.
Lines starting with % are passed through without any processing, allowing the embedding of shell code for loops and conditionals, while lines that do not are simply echoed out. Variables can be embedded with the {{variable}} syntax, and likewise for subshells ({{(shell)}}, but they cannot contain the } character).
Template example:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{lang}}">
<head>
<title>{{site_title}}</title>
% for style in $css; do
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/{{style}}.css">
% done
</head>sws will load (source) all the files or symlinks inside the _plugins subdirectory of the main directory. They can modify or extend how sws works, either by overriding its functions or by adding hooks.
get_meta FILE FIELD: given a filename, returns the contents ofFIELDif present.sws_skip FILE: given a filename, returnstrueif that file should not be handled by sws (by default this means thatFILE's basename starts with an underscore).sws_handle FILE: given a filename, either copies it to the destination directory or invokessws_markupandsws_pageto create the corresponding page. It also sets thenameandbarevariables.sws_markup FILE: strips the metadata fromFILEand either pipes it to a document converter or copies it straight to the output.sws_page: expects HTML markup on stdin, and invokes the header and footer templates while taking care of setting thepage_titleandprefixvariables.
src: the source directory.dst: the destination directory.from: the path of the current file being handled.name: the path where the file will be put after being processed.bare: the basename of the current file/page, minus the extension.prefix: relative path leading to the root of the site, used for example to link to CSS and other assets.
Hooks are called in FIFO order, and can be added by using the add_hook function to the pre_site, pre_page, post_page and post_site phase.
Syntax:
add_hook PHASE FUNCTIONpre_site and post_site are executed only once per sws call, immediately before and after processing the files in the source directory. The post_page hook is called, once for every file, after copying the file/creating a page from it.
A few sample plugins are included in the sws distribution.
A simple weblog plugin, it handles the creation of a chronological archive, a RSS feed and of an index page containing the last published article and links to the previous ones.
It can be minimally configured by setting the blog_show_older variable, which defaults to ten and which is the number of items (besides the very last article) that will be linked from the index page.
A very simple static wiki compiler, preprocessing markdown sources to handle wikilinks and appending a list of backlinks to each page. An index of all the pages in the wiki is also created under all.html.
The syntax for wikilinks is [[Description|Target]], with the description part being optional. Wikilinks pointing at inexistent pages are not linked and instead flagged with a superscript ?.
It overrides sws_markup, ignoring HTML files to pipe markdown files into the wikify function (a thin wrapper around an Awk script) before getting to the markdown processor.
Handles the creation of tag pages for a wiki or blog, extracting tag information from the %K metadata field, listing pages in reverse chronological order (newer first). These will be put in thetag sub-directory.
Copyright (c) 2018 mftrhu [email protected]
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