msg
An incredibly opinionated, hackable, minimal Static Site Generator.
See https://github.com/compromyse/compromyse.xyz for an example site.
The point of this project was very simple; I was in the mood to write a static site generator. I figured I'd start with the most basic feature, "includes," and it ended up expanding to supporting nested for loops. All I required was a simple static site generator that doesn't overdo it. Besides, who doesn't like writing a lexer and generation engine in C.
Compilation & Usage
# REQUIREMENTS: CMake, Git, GCC/Clang, GNUMake/Ninja
$ git clone https://github.com/compromyse/msg
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..
$ make # or ninja
$ ./msg -h
msg: The Minimal Static Site Generator
Usage: ./msg [-h] [-w] [-v] [-o <output>] <directory>
-h : Help
-w : Watch working directory for changes
-v : Verbose
-o <output>: Output directory
<directory>: Working directory
Site Structure
The site structure is actually fairly simple. /config.cfg describes the static directories, in this case only "assets." It could be any number of files & folders, though.
Since I wanted to manually define all the resources (pages), I added a list resources in /config.cfg to encapsulate the collection of web pages. This was largely inspired by C build systems, where each C file is listed in an array of filenames (See CMakeLists.txt for msg).
The partials though, must be placed in the hardcoded /partials folder. They may, however, be placed in subdirectories therein. I didn't see much of a point allowing multiple partial directories (and likewise with templates).
.
├── assets
│ └── me.webp
├── config.cfg
├── index.html
├── partials
│ ├── footer.html
│ ├── navbar.html
├── projects.html
└── templates
└── base.html
Features
Includes - include files from /partials
This directive simply fetches the file content of the operand, in this case /partials/navbar.html and replaces the caller's body with it.
<!-- index.html -->
<html>
<body>
{{ include "navbar.html" }}
...
</body>
</html>
Contentfor - define content for templates
In this particular case, the template must have content directives, whose bodies are defined using contentfor directives. The example is fairly self-explanatory.
<!-- templates/base.html -->
<html>
<head>
{{ content "head" }}
</head>
<body>
{{ body }}
</body>
</html>
<!-- index.html -->
{{ contentfor "head" }}
<title>HOME</title>
{{ endcontent }}
<p>...</p>
Eachdo - iterate over resources
These are actually fairly complicated; EACHDOs iterate over some array of strings or nested-configs.
In the first example, the source being iterated over is the current page's links config. For each link, it's simply printing the respective href and label.
<!-- projects/xyz.html -->
links = [
href = https://example.org
label = abc
___
href = https://google.com
label = test
]
---
<h1>XYZ!</h1>
{{ eachdo page.links }}
<p>{{ put href }}</p>
<p>{{ put label }}</p>
{{ endeachdo }}
With this example, /index.html is iterating over the projects resource (just the /projects directory excluding index.html). For each of the pages, it's simply printing the page's title in a paragraph tag.
<!-- projects/xyz.html -->
title = XYZ
---
<h1>XYZ!</h1>
<!-- index.html -->
{{ eachdo resources.projects }}
<p>{{ put title }}</p>
{{ endeachdo }}
This example is much like the first one, but instead of the links being defined in the current page, it's defined in /config.cfg.
<!-- config.cfg -->
links = [
href = https://github.com/compromyse
label = GITHUB
___
href = https://www.linkedin.com/in/compromyse
label = LINKEDIN
]
<!-- index.html -->
{{ eachdo config.links }}
<a href="{{ put href }}" class="button" target="_blank">{{ put label }}</a>
{{ endeachdo }}
Page Options - specify template, priority in EACHDO iterations, etc.
Some page options can be defined in a page's config, such as the template that needs to be used, and the priority of this particular page when the resource containing the page (projects) is iterated over.
<!-- projects/xyz.html -->
template = base_tailwind.html
priority = 100
---
<h1 class="p-2">XYZ!</h1>
Licensed under GPLv3