Serhan Ekici's Website

Overview

This ~300-line POSIX-compliant shell script is a flexible static site generator designed to transform content into a fully functional and transparent website. The generator's core philosophy is file-based modularity, where each piece of content in a directory is generated into a single file. It combines dynamic content generation with version control metadata to create a Git-driven static website.

Features

• D.R.Y. - Do Not Repeat Yourself

  • Configuration Management: The script uses a global conf file to define global settings, such as (BUILD_DIR, CSS_FILE, PICS_DIR, site_lang, default_footer, site_description...), and other globally defined custom variables. Individual files can also include their own conf file to override global variables or file-specific Git metadata.
  • Dynamic Placeholder Replacement: Placeholders like ${author_name}, ${date_created}, ${date_modified}, and ${title} are dynamically replaced with:
    • Git Metadata: For values like creation and modification timestamps, and author names.
    • Custom Variables: Defined in either the global conf file or file-specific conf files.

• Version Control:

  • Git metadata is integrated into every page, including:
    • Creation and Modification Timestamps: Automatically extracted from Git commit history.
    • Page-Specific Commit History: A chronological list of all commits affecting a page, complete with commit messages, author names, and direct links to the GitHub repository.

• Markdown Injection:

  • Converts Markdown files to HTML using cmark-gfm and injects the output into specified placeholders within HTML templates.
  • Enables the combination of simple Markdown content with HTML.

• Support for Modular Files:

  • Modular content can be split into multiple files (e.g., 0.md, 0.html) and processed sequentially.
  • Markdown files are converted to HTML using cmark-gfm, and prebuilt HTML files are appended directly, allowing for highly customizable page structures.

• Automatic Index and RSS Generation:

  • Automatically links generated pages in an index.html file.
  • Optionally adds pages to an RSS feed, complete with titles, timestamps, and descriptions.

Dependencies

• POSIX Utilities:
  • printf, tr, cut, tail head: Text processing.
• cmark-gfm: Converts Markdown files into HTML.
• git: Version control system for extracting commit metadata.
• shfmt: Formats shell scripts for consistent code style.
• shellcheck: Lints shell scripts to detect errors and enforce best practices.
• pre-commit: Manages and runs hooks in Git repositories, ensuring code quality.
• prettier: Formats HTML files for consistent and readable output.
• stylelint: Lints CSS and enforces consistent styling in stylesheets.

Build Instructions

1. Ensure all dependencies are installed and accessible in your system's PATH.
2. Make the script executable:

chmod +x ./gen

3. Run the script

./gen

TODO

• Unified logging.
• Parallelism maybe?
• Cache git metadata instead of invoking git log multiple times.