derek.gurchik.com

The source code for my site at http://derek.gurchik.com

Generator

Like countless other people, I've decided to write my own site generator. I used to use all the popular site generators out there like Jekyll, Hugo, etc. Whenever I took a break and returned to the code, I found the intricacies of the framework too hard to remember. Rather than worry about that anymore, I made a very simple generator.

• The files in static/ are copied directly to the build directory.
• The markdown files in content/ provide the content.
  • You need to specify a template name in the front matter of each file to know which template to use for the file.
  • Their organization within in the build directory matches the organization in the content directory. For example, content/some/path/to/post.md will be rendered to build/some/path/to/post.md.
• The Jinja templates in templates/ are used for rendering the content. The templates receive the following Jinja variables:
  • {{ content }} - The rendered html of the markdown file
  • {{ url }} - The url to the rendered markdown. For example, content/some/file.md will have a url of some/file. No .html extension is given due to the intention to deploy to Cloudflare Pages, see below.
  • In addition, any variables specified in the front matter (and defined in REQUIRED_FRONTMATTER).

Development setup

• virtualenv venv/
• source venv/bin/activate
• pip install -r requirements.txt
• ./serve.py

Deployment

I deploy to Cloudflare Pages because it's free and it's very easy to use a custom framework. Follow these instructions to set it up. All you need to do is specify ./build.py as the build command and build/ as the build output directory.

Dependencies listed in requirements.txt will automatically be installed prior to running the build command. The Python version can be specified by configuring the PYTHON_VERSION environment variable in the project settings, or by creating a .python-version file in the root of the project.

I'm also using a _redirects file, see more details here. Place this file in the static/ directory and it'll be copied to the build directory automatically.

Cloudflare Pages redirects all requests with a .html extension. Therefore, when writing hyperlinks in your built content, your link should remove the .html extension to save the client from an unnecessary redirect.

License

The site generator code (build.py) is licensed under the MIT license.

The overall of the site (contents of the static/, content/, and templates/ directories) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.