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Generating a static site using pandoc

DATE: 2018-08-02

AUTHOR: John L. Godlee

I use Jekyll[1] to generate my blog and that probably won't change any time soon. There's lots of other options for generating a static site from a folder of files, like Hugo[2] or Pelican[3], but Jekyll benefits massively from having a lot of support online and a big userbase, so it's always easy to fix any problems I'm having.

1: https://jekyllrb.com/

2: https://gohugo.io/

3: https://blog.getpelican.com/

That being said, I had heard some people on forums saying things like, "Just use pandoc and a makefile to generate your site, it's easy!", and I wanted to give something like that a go, so here is what I came up with. It's important to say at this point that I have no idea how to use a makefile, I might get round to it another time, but I am starting to get familiar with shell scripting, if only in a simplistic way.

So I have a folder full of markdown files in _posts/, each one of which is a blog post. In the YAML metadata at the top I have the type of page, the title, and the date:

---
layout: post
title: "Rebuilding a bike"
date: 2018-07-25
---

I can use pandoc to convert these markdown files to HTML with a css file to style the HTML. The CSS file can be seen here[4]. To convert a single markdown file I can do this:

4: /files/site_gen/site_gen.css

pandoc -f markdown -t html5 --standalone --css=site_gen.css -H site_gen.css -o site/2018-07-25-bike.html _posts/2018-07-25-bike.md

The output markup looks like this:

Sample page with pandoc

To do this on a folder of markdown files I have to name some variables and put it in a for loop:

# Define location of assets
css="site_gen.css"

head="header.html"

# Pandoc md posts to html with css and proper filenames
for i in _posts/*.md; do
    name=$(echo ${i##*/})
    filename=$(echo "$name" | cut -f 1 -d '.')
    pandoc -f markdown -t html5 --standalone --css=$css --include-before-body=$head -H $css -o "site/posts/${filename}.html" $i 
done

Note that in this version I've chosen to add the contents of header.html to the top of the main body of each generated HTML file using the --include-before-body command. header.html looks like this:

<a class='header' href="../index.html">HOME</a>

This adds a link to index.html, the homepage of the site at the top of each blog post.

I'm also adding the contents of the CSS file to the top of the HTML file as a <style></style> block, so each page appears with its styling even if it's taken out of the website and emailed for example, using the -H flag.

Now I need to generate index.html, which is basically going to be a list of the blog posts:

# Generate index page
ls -1 site/posts | sort -r | cat | while read string; do 
    echo -e "<p>\n <h1 class='home'><a href=posts/$string>$string</a></h1>\n</p>"
done > site/index.html 

# Prepend css style to index page
cat $css site/index.html > $.tmp && mv $.tmp site/index.html

# Delete line containing link to index page
sed -i '' '/index/d' site/index.html

So the whole script (gen.sh) now looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

# Generate a very simple website from a collection of markdown files

# Start from scratch
rm -r "site/"

mkdir "site/"

mkdir "site/posts/"

# Define location of assets
css="site_gen.css"

head="header.html"

# Pandoc md posts to html with css and proper filenames
for i in _posts/*.md; do
    name=$(echo ${i##*/})
    filename=$(echo "$name" | cut -f 1 -d '.')
    pandoc -f markdown -t html5 --standalone --css=$css --include-before-body=$head -H $css -o "site/posts/${filename}.html" $i 
done

# Generate index page
ls -1 site/posts | sort -r | cat | while read string; do 
    echo -e "<p>\n <h1 class='home'><a href=posts/$string>$string</a></h1>\n</p>"
done > site/index.html 

# Prepend css style to index page
cat $css site/index.html > $.tmp && mv $.tmp site/index.html

# Delete line containing link to index page
sed -i '' '/index/d' site/index.html

and the directory of files looks like this:

.
├── _posts
|   ├─ 2018-07-25-bike.md
|   └─ 2018-08-05-site-gen.md
├── gen.sh
├── header.html
├── site
|   ├─ index.html   
|   └─ posts
|      ├─ 2018-07-25-bike.html
|      └─ 2018-08-05-site-gen.html
└── site_gen.css