makesite

Simple, lightweight, and magic-free static site/blog generator for Python coders

1819

303

Python

makesite.py

Take full control of your static website/blog generation by writing your
own simple, lightweight, and magic-free static site generator in
Python. That’s right! Reinvent the wheel!

Introduction
But Why?
Get Started
The Code
Layout
Content
FAQ
Credits
License
Support

Introduction

This repository contains the source code of an example website
containing two static blogs and a few static pages. The website can be
generated by running makesite.py. The output looks like
this. That’s it!

So go ahead, fork this repository, replace the content with
your own, and generate your static website. It’s that simple!

You are free to copy, use, and modify this project for
your blog or website, so go ahead and fork this repository and make it
your own project. Change the layout if you wish to, improve
the stylesheet to suit your taste, enhance
makesite.py if you need to, and develop your website/blog
just the way you want it.

But Why?

For fun and profit! Okay, maybe not for profit, but hopefully for fun.

Have you used a popular static site generator like Jekyll to generate
your blog? I have too. It is simple and great. But then did you yearn
to use something even simpler to generate your blog? Do you like Python?
Perhaps the thought of writing your own static site generator crossed
your mind but you thought it would be too much work? If you answered
“yes” to these questions, then this project is for you.

With makesite.py, you are in full control. There is no
hidden magic! There is no need to read any documentation to understand
how it works. There is no need to learn how to write configuration files
to produce some desired effect.

With makesite.py:

The code is the documentation.
The code is the configuration.

Everything is laid out as plain and simple Python code for you to read
and enhance. It is less than 130 lines of code (excluding comments,
docstrings, and blank lines). It gets you off the ground pretty quickly.
You only need to execute makesite.py.

You can develop a decent website/blog within a few minutes and then you
can begin tinkering with the source code, the
layout, and the stylesheet to
customize the look and feel of your website to your satisfaction.

Get Started

This section provides some quick steps to get you off the ground as
quickly as possible.

For a quick demo on your local system, just enter this command:
```
make serve
```
If you don’t have make but have Python 3.x, enter this command:
```
python3 makesite.py
cd _site
python3 -m http.server
```
Note: In some environments, you may need to use python instead of
python3 to invoke Python 3.x.

If you only have Python 2.7, enter this command:
```
python makesite.py
cd _site
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
```
Then visit http://localhost:8000/. It should look like
this.

Note: You can run makesite.py with Python 2.7 or
Python 3.x.
You may see a few Cannot render Markdown warning messages in the
output of the previous command. This is due to the fact that an
example blog in this project has a few posts written
in Markdown. To render them correctly, install the commonmark
package with this command:
```
pip install commonmark
```
Then try the previous step again.
For an Internet-facing website, you would be hosting the static
website/blog on a hosting service and/or with a web server such as
Apache HTTP Server, Nginx, etc. You probably only need to generate
the static files and know where the static files are and move them
to your hosting location.

If you have the make command, enter this command to generate your
website:
```
make site
```
If you don’t have make but have python3, enter this command:
```
python3 makesite.py
```
Note: In some environments, you may need to use python instead of
python3 to invoke Python 3.x.

If you only have python, enter this command:
```
python makesite.py
```
The _site directory contains the entire generated website. The
content of this directory may be copied to your website hosting
location.

The Code

Now that you know how to generate the static website that comes with
this project, it is time to see what makesite.py does.
You probably don’t really need to read the entire section. The source
code is pretty self-explanatory but just in case, you need a detailed
overview of what it does, here are the details:

The main() function is the starting point of website generation.
It calls the other functions necessary to get the website generation
done.
First it creates a fresh new _site directory from scratch. All
files in the static directory are copied to this
directory. Later the static website is generated and written to this
directory.
Then it creates a params dictionary with some default parameters.
This dictionary is passed around to other functions. These other
functions would pick values from this dictionary to populate
placeholders in the layout template files.

Let us take the subtitle parameter for example. It is set
to our example website’s fictitious brand name: “Lorem Ipsum”. We
want each page to include this brand name as a suffix in the title.
For example, the about page
has “About - Lorem Ipsum” in its title. Now take a look at the
page layout template that is used as the layout
for all pages in the static website. This layout file uses the
{{ subtitle }} syntax to denote that it is a placeholder that
should be populated while rendering the template.

Another interesting thing to note is that a content file can
override these parameters by defining its own parameters in the
content header. For example, take a look at the content file for
the home page. In its content header, i.e.,
the HTML comments at the top with key-value pairs, it defines a new
parameter named title and overrides the subtitle parameter.

We will discuss the syntax for placeholders and content headers
later. It is quite simple.
It then loads all the layout templates. There are 6 of them in this
project.
- layout/page.html: It contains the base
  template that applies to all pages. It begins with
  <!DOCTYPE html> and <html>, and ends with </html>. The
  {{ content }} placeholder in this template is replaced with
  the actual content of the page. For example, for the about page,
  the {{ content }} placeholder is replaced with the the entire
  content from content/about.html. This is
  done with the make_pages() calls further down in the code.
- layout/post.html: It contains the template
  for the blog posts. Note that it does not begin with <!DOCTYPE html> and does not contain the <html> and </html> tags.
  This is not a complete standalone template. This template
  defines only a small portion of the blog post pages that are
  specific to blog posts. It contains the HTML code and the
  placeholders to display the title, publication date, and author
  of blog posts.
  
  This template must be combined with the
  page layout template to create the final
  standalone template. To do so, we replace the {{ content }}
  placeholder in the page layout template with
  the HTML code in the post layout template to
  get a final standalone template. This is done with the
  render() calls further down in the code.
  
  The resulting standalone template still has a {{ content }}
  placeholder from the post layout template
  template. This {{ content }} placeholder is then replaced
  with the actual content from the blog posts.
- layout/list.html: It contains the template
  for the blog listing page, the page that lists all the posts in
  a blog in reverse chronological order. This template does not do
  much except provide a title at the top and an RSS link at the
  bottom. The {{ content }} placeholder is populated with the
  list of blog posts in reverse chronological order.
  
  Just like the post layout template , this
  template must be combined with the
  page layout template to arrive at the final
  standalone template.
- layout/item.html: It contains the template
  for each blog post item in the blog listing page. The
  make_list() function renders each blog post item with this
  template and inserts them into the
  list layout template to create the blog
  listing page.
- layout/feed.xml: It contains the XML template
  for RSS feeds. The {{ content }} placeholder is populated with
  the list of feed items.
- layout/item.xml: It contains the XML template for
  each blog post item to be included in the RSS feed. The
  make_list() function renders each blog post item with this
  template and inserts them into the
  layout/feed.xml template to create the
  complete RSS feed.
After loading all the layout templates, it makes a render() call
to combine the post layout template with the
page layout template to form the final
standalone post template.

Similarly, it combines the list layout template
template with the page layout template to form
the final list template.
Then it makes two make_pages() calls to render the home page and a
couple of other site pages: the contact page
and the about page.
Then it makes two more make_pages() calls to render two blogs: one
that is named simply blog and another that is named
news.

Note that the make_pages() call accepts three positional
arguments:
- Path to content source files provided as a glob pattern.
- Output path template as a string.
- Layout template code as a string.
These three positional arguments are then followed by keyword
arguments. These keyword arguments are used as template parameters
in the output path template and the layout template to replace the
placeholders with their corresponding values.

As described in point 2 above, a content file can override these
parameters in its content header.
Then it makes two make_list() calls to render the blog listing
pages for the two blogs. These calls are very similar to the
make_pages() calls. There are only two things that are different
about the make_list() calls:
- There is no point in reading the same blog posts again that were
  read by make_pages(), so instead of passing the path to
  content source files, we feed a chronologically reverse-sorted
  index of blog posts returned by make_pages() to make_list().
- There is an additional argument to pass the
  item layout template as a string.
Finally it makes two more make_list() calls to generate the RSS
feeds for the two blogs. There is nothing different about these
calls than the previous ones except that we use the feed XML
templates here to generate RSS feeds.

To recap quickly, we create a _site directory to write the static site
generated, define some default parameters, load all the layout
templates, and then call make_pages() to render pages and blog posts
with these templates, call make_list() to render blog listing pages
and RSS feeds. That’s all!

Take a look at how the make_pages() and make_list() functions are
implemented. They are very simple with less than 20 lines of code each.
Once you are comfortable with this code, you can begin modifying it to
add more blogs or reduce them. For example, you probably don’t need a
news blog, so you may delete the make_pages() and make_list() calls
for 'news' along with its content at content/news.

Layout

In this project, the layout template files are located in the layout
directory. But they don’t necessarily have to be there. You can
place the layout files wherever you want and update
makesite.py accordingly.

The source code of makesite.py that comes with this
project understands the notion of placeholders in the layout templates.
The template placeholders have the following syntax:

{{ <key> }}

Any whitespace before {{, around <key>, and after }} is ignored.
The <key> should be a valid Python identifier. Here is an example of
template placeholder:

{{ title }}

This is a very simple template mechanism that is implemented already in
the makesite.py. For a simple website or blog, this
should be sufficient. If you need a more sophisticated template engine
such as Jinja2 or
Cheetah, you need to modify
makesite.py to add support for it.

Content

In this project, the content files are located in the content
directory. Most of the content files are written in HTML.
However, the content files for the blog named blog are
written in Markdown.

The notion of headers in the content files is supported by
makesite.py. Each content file may begin with one or more
consecutive HTML comments that contain headers. Each header has the
following syntax:

<!-- <key>: <value> -->

Any whitespace before, after, and around the  tokens are ignored. Here are some example headers:

<!-- title: About -->
<!-- subtitle: Lorem Ipsum -->
<!-- author: Admin -->

It looks for the headers at the top of every content file. As soon as
some non-header text is encountered, the rest of the content from that
point is not checked for headers.

By default, placeholders in content files are not populated during
rendering. This behaviour is chosen so that you can write content freely
without having to worry about makesite interfering with the content,
i.e., you can write something like {{ title }} in the content and
makesite would leave it intact by default.

However if you do want to populate the placeholders in a content file,
you need to specify a parameter named render with value of yes. This
can be done in two ways:

Specify the parameter in a header in the content file in the
following manner:
```

```

Specify the parameter as a keyword argument in make_pages call.
For example:

blog_posts = make_pages('content/blog/*.md',
                        '_site/blog/{{ slug }}/index.html',
                        post_layout, blog='blog', render='yes',
                        **params)

FAQ

Here are some frequently asked questions along with answers to them:

Can you add feature X to this project?

I do not have any plans to add new features to this project. It is
intended to be as minimal and as simple as reasonably possible. This
project is meant to be a quick-starter-kit for developers who want
to develop their own static site generators. Someone who needs more
features is free to fork this project repository and customize the
project as per their needs in their own fork.
Can you add support for Jinja templates, YAML front matter, etc.?

I will not add or accept support for Jinja templates, YAML front
matter, etc. in this project. However, you can do so in your fork.
The reasons are explained in the first point.
Do you accept any new features from the contributors?

I do not accept any new features in this project. The reasons are
explained in the first point.
Do you accept bug fixes and improvements?

Yes, I accept bug fixes and minor improvements that do not increase
the scope and complexity of this project.
Are there any contribution guidelines?

Yes, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.
How do I add my own copyright notice to the source code without
violating the terms of license while customizing this project in my
own fork?

This project is released under the terms of the MIT license. One of
the terms of the license is that the original copyright notice and
the license text must be preserved. However, at the same time, when
you edit and customize this project in your own fork, you hold the
copyright to your changes. To fulfill both conditions, please add
your own copyright notice above the original copyright notice and
clarify that your software is a derivative of the original.

Here is an example of such a notice where a person named J. Doe
wants to reserve all rights to their changes:
```
# Copyright (c) 2018-2019 J. Doe
# All rights reserved

# This software is a derivative of the original makesite.py.
# The license text of the original makesite.py is included below.
```
Anything similar to the above notice or something to this effect is
sufficient.

Credits

Thanks to:

Susam Pal for the initial documentation
and the initial unit tests.
Keith Gaughan for an improved
single-pass rendering of templates.

License

This is free and open source software. You can use, copy, modify,
merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of it,
under the terms of the MIT License.

This software is provided “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
express or implied. See the MIT License for details.

Support

To report bugs, suggest improvements, or ask questions, please visit
https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/issues.