Slick Template

A cloneable template for building a static site with slick!

For an example of what the site will look like, check out my blog!

Here's the configuration for my site if you're curious.

Get up and running with slick in no time!

Here's all you need to do to have your own site:

Click the green Use this template button at the top of this page (next to "clone")
Clone your new site repo
Edit your siteMeta inside Main.hs
Add some awesome blog posts in site/posts/ by copying the sample post there
run stack build; stack exec build-site
Serve your docs directory by enabling Github Pages in your repository's settings
...?
Profit!

If you want a quick tool for serving your file system during development I recommend using serve:

$ npm install -g serve
$ serve docs

Then navigate to the port which is serving (usually http://localhost:3000 or http://localhost:5000 )

Tips

Everything is just html, css, and javascript! Edit things to your heart's content!
Templates are in site/tempates; they use the Mustache template language.
You'll need to delete your .shake directory when you edit Main.hs to avoid stale build caches.
Slick is good at updating and creating files, but it doesn't delete stale files. When in doubt you can delete your whole output directory.

Caching guide

Shake takes care of most of the tricky parts, but there're still a few things you need to know.

Cache-busting in Slick works using Development.Shake.Forward. The idea is that you can wrap actions with cacheAction, providing an unique identifier for each time it runs. Shake will track any dependencies which are triggered during the first run of that action and can use them to detect when that particular action must be re-run. Typically you'll want to cache an action for each "thing" you have to load, e.g. when you load a post, or when you build a page. You can also nest these caches if you like.

When using cacheAction Shake will automatically serialize and store the results of that action to disk so that on a later build it can simply 'hydrate' that asset without running the command. For this reason, your data models should probably implement Binary. Here's an example data model:

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DeriveAnyClass #-}

import Data.Aeson (ToJSON, FromJSON)
import Development.Shake.Classes (Binary)
import GHC.Generics (Generic)

-- | Data for a blog post
data Post =
    Post { title   :: String
         , author  :: String
         , content :: String
         , url     :: String
         , date    :: String
         , image   :: Maybe String
         }
    deriving (Generic, Eq, Ord, Show, FromJSON, ToJSON, Binary)

If you need to run arbitrary shell commands you can use cache; it will do its best to track file use during the run of the command and cache-bust on that; results may vary. It's likely better to use explicit tracking commands like readFile' when possible, (or even just use readFile' on the files you depend on, then throw away the results. It's equivalent to explicitly depending on the file contents).

Shake has many dependency tracking combinators available; whenever possible you should use the shake variants of these (e.g. copyFileChanged, readFile', writeFile', etc.). This will allow shake to detect when and what it needs to rebuild.

Note: You'll likely need to delete .shake in your working directory after editing your Main.hs file as shake can get confused if rules change without it noticing.

Example

Here's a FULL static website! This is the Main.hs for this template repo.

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}
{-# LANGUAGE DeriveAnyClass #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

module Main where

import           Control.Lens
import           Control.Monad
import           Data.Aeson                 as A
import           Data.Aeson.Lens
import           Development.Shake
import           Development.Shake.Classes (Binary)
import           Development.Shake.Forward
import           Development.Shake.FilePath
import           GHC.Generics               (Generic)
import           Slick

import qualified Data.Text                  as T


outputFolder :: FilePath
outputFolder = "docs/"

-- | Data for the index page
data IndexInfo =
  IndexInfo
    { posts :: [Post]
    } deriving (Generic, Show, FromJSON, ToJSON)

-- | Data for a blog post
data Post =
    Post { title   :: String
         , author  :: String
         , content :: String
         , url     :: String
         , date    :: String
         , image   :: Maybe String
         }
    deriving (Generic, Eq, Ord, Show, FromJSON, ToJSON, Binary)

-- | given a list of posts this will build a table of contents
buildIndex :: [Post] -> Action ()
buildIndex posts' = do
  indexT <- compileTemplate' "site/templates/index.html"
  let indexInfo = IndexInfo {posts = posts'}
      indexHTML = T.unpack $ substitute indexT (toJSON indexInfo)
  writeFile' (outputFolder </> "index.html") indexHTML

-- | Find and build all posts
buildPosts :: Action [Post]
buildPosts = do
  pPaths <- getDirectoryFiles "." ["site/posts//*.md"]
  forP pPaths buildPost

-- | Load a post, process metadata, write it to output, then return the post object
-- Detects changes to either post content or template
buildPost :: FilePath -> Action Post
buildPost srcPath = cacheAction ("build" :: T.Text, srcPath) $ do
  liftIO . putStrLn $ "Rebuilding post: " <> srcPath
  postContent <- readFile' srcPath
  -- load post content and metadata as JSON blob
  postData <- markdownToHTML . T.pack $ postContent
  let postUrl = T.pack . dropDirectory1 $ srcPath -<.> "html"
      withPostUrl = _Object . at "url" ?~ String postUrl
  -- Add additional metadata we've been able to compute
  let fullPostData = withPostUrl $ postData
  template <- compileTemplate' "site/templates/post.html"
  writeFile' (outputFolder </> T.unpack postUrl) . T.unpack $ substitute template fullPostData
  -- Convert the metadata into a Post object
  convert fullPostData

-- | Copy all static files from the listed folders to their destination
copyStaticFiles :: Action ()
copyStaticFiles = do
    filepaths <- getDirectoryFiles "./site/" ["images//*", "css//*", "js//*"]
    void $ forP filepaths $ \filepath ->
        copyFileChanged ("site" </> filepath) (outputFolder </> filepath)

-- | Specific build rules for the Shake system
--   defines workflow to build the website
buildRules :: Action ()
buildRules = do
  allPosts <- buildPosts
  buildIndex allPosts
  copyStaticFiles

main :: IO ()
main = slick buildRules

ChrisPenner/slick-template

Slick Template

Tips

Caching guide

Example