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Static Blog Builder

subtitle: A few static blog rewrite experiences

author: Yann Esposito

email: yann@esposito.host

gpg

date: [2021-05-01 Sat]

keywords: blog static

description: Minimal and fast static website builder with make.

As someone on the Internet said not so far ago.

Building its own static building system is a rite of passage for many developers.

It has a lot of nice features.

It gives a goal with a feeling of accomplishment.

It is simple enough so most developers could build their own system.

It could also become complex when you go down the rabbit hole.

Along the years I used different tools and used and wrote of few static

website systems:

nanoc

(in Ruby), at that time it looked like this:

old nanoc 2 website

hakyll

(haskell static website generator)

org-publish

(emacs package in conjunction with org-mode)

shake

(haskell again)

So if you look at the progression, I first used nanoc because I used ruby

and it was a new solution, the website looked really great.

Also the main developer

Denis Defreyne

was really helpful.

Ruby was really great at dealing with regular expressions for hacking my

documents.

Then I was interested in Haskell, and I switched to a Haskell-made

solution.

I used hakyll, and I wrote a bit about it in

Hakyll Setup

As a side note, the author of Hakyll

Jasper Van der Jeugt

is apparently a

friend of the author of nanoc.

They both wrote a static site generators with their preferred programming

language.

I added a lot of personal features to my own site builder.

It was a nice toy project.

Then, due to a major disruption in my professional and private life I

stopped to take care of my website.

And a few years ago, I wanted to start a new website from scratch.

In the meantime I switched my editor of choice from vim to Emacs.

I started to work in Clojure and emacs is generally a natural choice

because you can configure it with LISP.

I discovered

org-mode

(I don't think the homepage of org mode makes justice

to how incredible it is).

So org-mode comes with an export system.

Thus I switched to org-publish.

Again

I wrote a bit about it

It was nice but slow.

I improved a few things like writing a short script to

Generate RSS from a tree of html files.

I still had the feeling it was too slow.

Static site building is a specific usage of a build system.

And as I knew I could use =pandoc= to build HTML out of org-mode files

and still versed in the Haskell culture I decided to try

shake

You can learn more by reading this excellent paper about it, I

think all developer should read it:

Build System à la carte

As a bonus,

pandoc

is written in Haskell.

I could then directly use the

pandoc

library in my build program.

It worked like a charm and it was *very fast* as compared to other

solutions I tried.

So really let me tell you shake is a great build system.

Unfortunately it was not perfect.

While it was very fast, and I was able to use pandoc API directly.

It made me dependent on Haskell.

The best way I found to have Haskell reproducible build environment is to

use

nix

This was great until the Big Sur update.

To keep it short, nix stopped working on my computers after I upgraded my

to Big Sur.

Gosh, it was painful to fix.

Concurrently I discovered

gemini

and wanted to duplicate my website into

gemini sphere.

So I tried to update my build system but my code was to oriented to use

pandoc and it was painful to have gemini in the middle of it.

Particularly, generating a gemini index file.

My main goal was to have gemini file that could only be linked from withing

gemini sphere.

Because gemini is a lot smaller web where you could feel a bit more

protected from what the Web has become along the years.

Whatever, in the end, I just had two problems to tackles.

1. Haskell became difficult to trust as very stable tool. Stable in the

sense that I would not have any support work to do in order to keep just

using it and not fixing/tweaking it.

2. Simplify the overall system to have a simpler build description

So a very stable tool that I am pretty sure will still work almost exactly

as today in 10 years is *=make=* (more precisely gnumake).

I expected a lot of people had already come to the same conclusion and

wrote about it.

To my great surprise, I found very few article about generating static

website with make.

I only found solutions a bit too specific for my need.

This is why I would like to give you a more generic starting point

solution.

The =Makefile=

Instead of copy/pasting my current =Makefile= entirely let me give you a

more generic one.

It should be a great start.

The first part will be used to simply copy the files from =src/= to

=_site/=.

all: website

# directory containing my org files as well as my assets files
SRC_DIR ?= src
# directory where I will but the files for my website (HTML + assets)
DST_DIR ?= _site

# list all files in src
# if you want to exclude .org files use the exclude from the find command
SRC_RAW_FILES := $(shell find $(SRC_DIR) -type f)
# generate all file that should be copied in the site
# For my site, I want to publish my source files along the HTML files
DST_RAW_FILES   := $(patsubst $(SRC_DIR)/%,$(DST_DIR)/%,$(SRC_RAW_FILES))
ALL             += $(DST_RAW_FILES)

# COPY EVERYTHING (.org file included)
$(DST_DIR)/% : $(SRC_DIR)/%
	mkdir -p "$(dir $@)"
	cp "{body}lt;" "$@"

This part is about running the =pandoc= command for all =org= files in =src/=

so they generate a html file in =_site/=.

# ORG -> HTML, If you prefer markdown replace .org by .md
EXT := .org
# all source file we'll pass to pandoc
SRC_PANDOC_FILES ?= $(shell find $(SRC_DIR) -type f -name "*$(EXT)")
# all destination files we expect (replace the extension by .html)
DST_PANDOC_FILES ?= $(subst $(EXT),.html, \
                        $(subst $(SRC_DIR),$(DST_DIR), \
                            $(SRC_PANDOC_FILES)))
ALL              += $(DST_PANDOC_FILES)

# use a template (you should use one)
TEMPLATE ?= templates/post.html
# URL of the CSS put yours
CSS = /css/y.css
# The pandoc command to run to generate an html out of a source file
PANDOC := pandoc \
			-c $(CSS) \
			--template=$(TEMPLATE) \
			--from org \
			--to html5 \
			--standalone

# Generate all html if the org file change or the template change
$(DST_DIR)/%.html: $(SRC_DIR)/%.org $(TEMPLATE)
	mkdir -p $(dir $@)
	$(PANDOC) {body}lt; \
		--output $@

A missing part is often the part where you would like to generate

an index page to list the latest posts.

Here you are a bit alone, you need to make one yourself.

There is not generic way to do this one.

# Generating an index page is not difficult but not trivial either
HTML_INDEX := $(DST_DIR)/index.html
MKINDEX := engine/mk-index.sh
$(HTML_INDEX): $(DST_PANDOC_FILES) $(MKINDEX)
	mkdir -p $(DST_DIR)
	$(MKINDEX)
ALL += $(HTML_INDEX)

Finally, a few useful make commands. =make clean= and =make deploy=.

# make deploy will deploy the files to my website write your own script
deploy: $(ALL)
	engine/deploy.sh

website: $(ALL)

.PHONY: clean

clean:
	-rm -rf $(DST_DIR)/*

Limitation: =make= is old.

So it really does not support spaces in filenames.

Take care of that.

Let me tell you.

While this is quite a minimalist approach (<100 lines) it is nevertheless *very fast*.

It will only generate the minimal amount of work to generate your website.

I have a nice watcher script that update the website every time I save a

file.

It is almost instantaneous.

The only risky dependencies for my website now is =pandoc=.

Perhaps, they will change how they generate an HTML from the same org file

in the future.

I still use =nix= to pin my pandoc version.

The static site builder itself is very simple, very stable and still

very efficient.

As a conclusion, if you want to write your own static site builder that's great.

There are plenty of things to learn along the way.

Still if you want something stable for a long time, with a minimal amount

of dependencies, I think this Makefile is really a great start.

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