Emile

A workflow companion for Zola.

Features

• watch over the blog directory to:
  • rebuild site on modification
  • schedule posts
  • publish on social media (Mastodon and/or Bluesky) when a scheduled post is live
    • templating of the post to push
    • add links to social media posts in the published blog article
• new command to create a new post using a predefined template into a specified dir
• schedule command to set the wanted publication date of a post
• publish command to change state of a draft to publish (deprecated)

Build

You need to have Rust installed, then:

cargo build --release

Prerequisites

emile relies on the presence of zola to be installed and in the PATH on the server and your workstation.

Installation

You need to make emile findable in the PATH as well, both on the server hosting the blog and your workstation.

If using social media feature, you need to make sure that emile has access to the web.

Configuration

In the blog's folder, you can have an emile.toml file to tweak different input/output behaviours (default values shown):

# drafts created with `new` command will end here. Path relative to root of the blog.
drafts_creation_dir = "content/drafts/"

# on `new`, emile will add this amount of year to the draft post.
# It’s a dirty hack to push drafts to the top of the list on the blog homepage.
drafts_year_shift = 0

# emile will take this file to create a draft post by adding `title`, `date` and 
#`draft = true` in the frontmatter 
draft_template = "draft.txt"

# Destination for `publish` command.
publish_dest = "content/"

# Scheduling directory, used by `watch` command
schedule_dir = "content/drafts/scheduled/"

# Default time for `schedule` command, if only a date is given
default_sch_time = "12:00:00"

# Timezone relative to UTC you're writing the post in, affect `publish` and `schedule` 
# commands
timezone = 0

# for `watch` command. number of seconds to wait before processing filesystem changes 
# events
debouncing = 2

# Section to activate posting on social media
[social]
# file in /template to use as the toot’s template
social_template = "social.txt"

# file in /template to use as the snippet to replace `link_tag` in the blog post
link_template = "social_link.txt"

# tag to put in the blog post, to be replaced by the `link_template` snippet to have link 
# to social media post
link_tag = "{$ emile_social $}"

# if a tag match, use the associated lang (ex: [{ tag = "english", lang = "en" }])
tag_lang = []

# tag in the list will not be in the social post (ex: ["english", "misc"])
filtered_tag = []

# social instances to post to. One per `api` (accepted values are "mastodon" or "bluesky"). 
#`*_var` are environment variable to read the needed value from. If `social` is present, 
# it cannot be empty
# ex: 
# { server = "mastodon.social", api = "mastodon", token_var = "EMILE_MASTODON_TOKEN" }, 
# { server = "bsky.social", api = "bluesky", handle_var = "EMILE_BLUESKY_ID", token_var = "EMILE_BLUESKY_PWD" }
instances = []

Usage

This is how I use emile. On the server hosting the blog, I launch emile in watcher mode (see Commands below) so it will catch changes that need a rebuild of the site, and it will monitor the schedule_dir and parse the files inside to schedule their publication.

On my desktop, I use new and schedule to create and put articles to be published.

To synchronize my desktop with the server, I use unison, available on all platforms (but any sync tools will do), and the watcher emile above takes care of everything.

I admit that I don’t use publish, it is here for historical reasons and might be removed in the future.

Commands

emile help and emile help <command> to get all the details.

new

The new command takes the title of your new blog post, between quotes:

emile new "My new blog post"

This will create a file in the drafts_creation_dir directory, using slugified version of the title as the file’s name, current date + drafts_year_shift years in the date field, using draft_template file as the template.

publish (deprecated)

This command takes a file path as parameter. It will change its date to current date and draft status and move it to the publish_dest directory. Note that the site is not rebuild.

Since the watch command, the need for publish doesn’t seem obvious and might be removed in the future.

emile publish ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md

schedule

This will move the given file to schedule_dir and change the frontmatter date field. If only a date is given, default_sch_time will be used. The date can be provided in the formats supported by human-date-parser.

A few examples:

emile schedule now ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md
emile schedule tomorrow ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md
emile schedule "2024-06-27" ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md # this uses `default_sch_time`
emile schedule "06-27" ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md # this is completed with current year and `default_sch_time`
emile schedule "27" ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md # this is completed with current year, month and `default_sch_time`
emile schedule "14:13" ./content/drafts/my_new_blog_post.md # this is completed with current day or next one if the hour is past

watch

This command will put emile in watcher mode, waiting for modifications in the blog.

On modification in the schedule_dir, it will schedule the post in it according to the frontmatter’s date field.

On modification in /content/posts or anywhere not draft_creation_dir it will rebuild the blog.

Social media support

When a post is published, it is possible to publish a post on social media. Currently, Mastodon and Bluesky are supported. You need to configure the social section (see Configuration above).

Social post template

The template system is very rude and is a simple text replace supporting:

• {title}: the title of the post
• {link}: the link to the post
• {tags}: the tags of the post, filtered tags are not included, and if #rust is found, #RustLang is added

ex:

New post!
“{title}” 
{link}
{tags}

You need at least one template file in the /template directory, with the name specified in social_template.

Social media link

emile can add links to the social media posts it created so people can react on your article. The tag defined by link_tag will be replaced by the expanded template link_template.

The file specified in link_template must be in the /template directory. It must contains one {links} (plural) tag which will be expanded to a list of links to the social media posts.

ex:

 
---

React on {links}.

Multilingual templates

You can add a social template of a different language by adding .lang before .txt in the file’s name.

ex: social.fr.txt and social_link.fr.txt