gempost

gempost is a minimal static site generator for publishing a blog (gemlog) on the Gemini protocol.

You store metadata about each gemlog post in a sidecar YAML file, and gempost generates a gemtext index page and an Atom feed.

You can use a Tera template to customize the format of the index page. You can also use a template to customize the format of the gemlog posts themselves, such as to add a copyright footer or a navigation header to each post. See Examples for examples of both.

The metadata in the sidecar YAML file allows you to generate an Atom feed with rich metadata, but most of this metadata is optional and not necessary to generate a working feed.

Getting started

Installing gempost

To install gempost, you must first install Rust. Then, you can install gempost with Cargo.

cargo install gempost

Creating a new gempost project

You can initialize a new gempost project like this:

gempost init ./capsule

This will create a directory ./capsule/ that looks like this:

capsule/
├── gempost.yaml
├── posts/
│   ├── hello-world.gmi
│   └── hello-world.yaml
├── static/
│   └── index.gmi
└── templates/
    ├── index.tera
    └── post.tera

This includes:

An example gempost.yaml config file to get you started. You'll need to edit this to set your capsule's title and URL.
Some basic templates you can use as-is or customize.
A "hello world" example post for your gemlog, with its accompanying sidecar metadata file.
A static index.gmi for your capsule root.

Edit the gempost.yaml and you're ready to build your capsule!

Building your capsule

cd ./capsule
gempost build

Your capsule will be generated in the ./public/ directory. You'll need a Gemini server like Agate to actually serve your capsule over the Gemini protocol. Check out Awesome Gemini for a more complete list of Gemini servers.

Creating a new post

You can add a new post to your gemlog with gempost new <slug>. This creates a .gmi file in the ./posts/ directory with an accompanying .yaml metadata file. See examples/metadata.yaml for an example of all the different values you can set in the YAML metadata file. Only some are required.

Adding static content

You can add new static content to your capsule (anything that's not your gemlog) by putting it in the ./static/ directory. If a file in the static directory conflicts with one generated by gempost, the one if the static directory will win.

Customizing templates

You can customize the index page and post page templates in the ./templates/ directory from their defaults. They use the Tera text templating language, which is similar to the popular Jinja templating language. See the Templates section below for a list of all the variables that are available inside these template.

Examples

Running gempost init will generate minimal index page and post page templates you can use to get started. These will probably be fine for most users.

However, if you want to see more complex examples of what you can do with templates, the examples below make use of more of the post metadata to provide more rich output. You can use these templates as-is, or as a guide to write your own.

See examples/index.tera for an example of an index page template.
See examples/post.tera for an example of a post page template.

Additionally, see examples/metadata.yaml for an example of a sidecar gemlog post metadata file showing all the possible fields.

Templates

The index page template has access to:

A feed variable which is a Feed object.

The post page template has access to:

A feed variable which is a Feed object.
An entry variable which is an Entry object for the current post.

All dates are in RFC 3339 format, which looks like this:

2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00

Author object

name (string) The name of the author
email (string, optional) The author's email address
uri (string, optional) A URI describing the author

Entry object

url (string) The URL of the post
title (string) The title of the post
body (string) The gemtext body of the post
updated (string) When the post was last updated
summary (string, optional) The summary of the post
published (string, optional) When the post was originally published
author (Author object, optional) The author of the post
rights (string, optional) The copyright and license information for the post
lang (string, optional) The RFC 5646 language code for the language the post is written in (e.g. en, de)
categories (array of strings) The list of categories the post belongs to

Feed object

capsule_url (string) The URL of your capsule's homepage
feed_url (string) The URL of the Atom feed
index_url (string) The URL of the gemlog index page
title (string) The title of the feed
updated (string) When any post in the feed was last updated
subtitle (string, optional) The subtitle of the feed
rights (string, optional) The copyright and license information for the feed
author (Author object, optional) The primary author of the feed
entries (array of Entry objects) The list of posts in the feed, sorted reverse-chronologically by publish date or, if no publish date, last updated date

Suggestions

Here are some miscellaneous suggestions for working with gempost.

You can check your gempost project directory into a VCS of your choice if you like; just make sure you configure it to ignore the ./public/ directory!

If your Gemini server expects to find your capsule in a particular directory, you can change the location of the ./public/ directory from its default in the gempost.yaml. Note that file paths in the gempost.yaml do not support tilde expansion.

Every post must have a unique ID to generate the Atom feed. Atom require that this be a globally unique URI that never ever changes. So, as an alternative to using your post URL, which might change, you can use a UUID URN:

urn:uuid:165b10e8-78c9-45ba-83ef-2f7bd5d89725

Running gempost new will automatically assign a UUID post ID.

Each post must have a time last updated and, optionally, time originally published. To get the current time in RFC 3339 format—the format gempost expects—you can use this command on *nix platforms:

date --rfc-3339 seconds

Similar tools

Check out these other awesome static site generators for gemlogs:

justlark/gempost