statue

statue is a very simple and opinionated static site generator, written using only nix. To generate the html content, it uses pandoc and a small python script to extract the metadata from markdown files.

Requirements

The only requirement is nix, so quit what you're doing and go install it.

Installation

No download is needed in order to use statue, since the nix expression can be imported directly from this git repo:

statue = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
  owner = "alexpeits";
  repo = "statue";
  rev = "<commit sha>";
  sha256 = "<use nix-prefetch-git to get this>";
};

To get the sha256 for a specific revision, do:

$ nix-prefetch-git https://github.com/alexpeits/statue <commit sha>

To call the expression, you need to specify some options in the configuration.

Configuration

These are all the options that are configurable:

• siteTitle (required) - the site title that's used in the html title tag
• postsDir (required) - the directory that contains posts
• rootDir (default null) - the root directory for the site, used for finding out the root of a git repo to generate the build info
• navPages (default []) - a list of paths to markdown/nix files that form the navbar
• buildInfo (default true) - whether to create a build-info.txt file at the site root, containing the commit hash an time
• htmlHead (default "") - string that will be added to the html head tag, useful for adding css, scripts and favicons
• extraScript (default {inputs = p: []; script = "";}) - extra script to run after generating the site, inputs is a function from packages to list of packages that the script should have available

Usage

A very basic derivation (see also the example), should look like this:

let
  config = {
    siteTitle = "Example";
    navPages = [ ./about.md ];
    rootDir = ./.;
    postsDir = ./posts;
    buildInfo = false;
    htmlHead = ''
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/default.css" />
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/syntax.css" />
    '';
    extraScript = {
      inputs = p: [ p.minify ];
      script = ''
        cp -R ${./static/whatever.txt} $out

        mkdir -p $out/css
        for css in $(find ${./static/css} -name '*.css'); do
          minify -o $out/css/$(basename $css) $css
        done
      '';
    };
  };

  statue = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "alexpeits";
    repo = "statue";
    rev = "<commit sha>";
    sha256 = "<use nix-prefetch-git to get this>";
  };
in
import statue { config = config; }

This will output the site to the result symlink directory, you can then copy the contents to the desired target. For a full example, take a look at my site.

Post format

Posts and nav pages can either be markdown files, or nix files.

Markdown posts

Markdown posts need to include some meta-data in the form of front-matter, which looks like this:

---
title: Some post
description: Description about some post
tags: one
      two
---

content

the only required key is title, and tags can be multiple items, separated by newlines as in the example above. description is used in the post list and it is optional as well.

Nix posts

Posts in nix can be useful to automate some repetition, e.g. listing your projects. Nix posts are functions that expect nixpkgs as input, and should return a record that looks like this:

{ meta = {
    title = "Some post";
    description = "Description about some post";
    tags = [ "one" "two" ];
  };
  content = ''
    # Something
    content
  '';
}

where content is some markdown that is then converted to html.