/indices

A tiny static-site generator based on indices and trees. Made as a way to learn the syntax of Go

Primary LanguageGoMIT LicenseMIT

indices

indices is a simple, personal static-site generator written in Go. I made it for two reasons:

  • I couldn't find any other static-site generators that met my desire for simplicity. With indices, I can just drag my Markdown source to the binary and commit, and pages are simple and self-index.
  • I wanted a small project to help me learn Go.

Inspiration for the design and layout of pages comes from jrl.ninja and schollz.com.

Usage

indices has no customizability. If you want to make changes to its appearance, for example, you'll need to change the source and build a binary yourself, but this should not be a difficult process.

  • indices is built like a file system. Imagine that you're writing a site like you would with HTML, but write it with Markdown instead. Other than that, it just adds a self-indexing system.
    • For example, in the root directory of your website, you might have an index.md file as a homepage and an about.md file for personal details. When you run the binary on your website source, index.md will compile to index.html and include a navigation section that links to the personal details page (and any other pages in the directory). about.md will compile to about/index.html and include a note at the bottom of the page that links to the index.html of the directory.
    • For a more detailed example, see my website source.
  • The title of each page is the first line of the .md with anything except a-z, A-Z, , . and - removed.
  • Use \ at the end of Markdown lines to end the paragraph/force a line break.
  • With a binary, just run indices <website source directory>. Any files not ending in .md will be copied to the final static site.

Build

  1. Make sure you have Go installed.
  2. Then get blackfriday, the Markdown processor with go get gopkg.in/russross/blackfriday.v2.
  3. Then just run go build to build a binary.

Notes

  • indices uses blackfriday and does NOT sanitize input! It will copy over HTML tags, scripts, etc.
  • The HTML used to generate the static sites is in indices.go. If you want to change the appearance or something else about the sites indices generates, start there!
  • The code for this repository is sloppy! It's the first program I made with Go (I wanted to learn it), and it could definitely stand some refactoring. Here be dragons!