zombrodo / blog

My personal static site generator

Blog

A personal static site generator, written in Lua.

Mostly written in an exercise to learn LPeg, but also fill a need in which I wanted to roll my own static blog. Lua is my current flavour of the month, so thought I might give it a hoon.

This isn't really intended to be used by anyone other than me, but putting it out there might help someone in need!

Features

• Markdown parser written with LPeg
• Templating provided by Mustache / Lustache
• ??? (there's a TODO list)

Should I (you) do this?

Probably not. As stated in the opener, this was more of a personal project, and there are far more useful languages to do it in. I might make a blog about it, though.

My main findings (so far):

• Don't parse markdown, find someone who has done it for you.
• LPeg is pretty cool.
• I wish Lua had better filesystem functions, but I kinda understand why it doesn't have them.
• sleep is a real function on Linux. Some implementations of a sleep are just while loops that count the number of seconds/milliseconds that have passed.

Install

Until I get a rockspec up and running, this'll be a manual process.

Note about Windows

I personally use Windows on my computer at home, and tools like LPeg are a headache to compile on Windows - especially with my ineptitude in play. I've instead opted to use Luarocks for most of the heavy lifting, which unfortunately is also sorta painful on Windows.

For the sake of progress, this is all built on WSL using Alpine Linux, which was relatively easy to get setup.

Lua

• apk add lua
• apk add lua5.1-dev
• And adapting the steps on the Luarocks homepage for Alpine

When installing Luarocks, there'll be a few other dependencies that need to be installed - curl, unzip, and openssl are the ones off the top of my head, but the installer will prompt you as you go.

Luarocks

The following dependencies are required from luarocks:

• luarocks install luafilesystem
• luarocks install lpeg

Other

Thinking I could get away without using Luarocks, there's also a version of lustache in the lib folder. This should be shifted to a Luarocks managed install, eventually.

Tests are written using lust.

Running

• ./test.lua will run the tests.
• ./generate.lua will generate the

Generation, in a nutshell

Generation is pretty simple, and follows the below steps:

1. A Render run is specified by the path to the templates, and a writer.

• A template is the structure of a page - index, head and post
• A writer takes the nodes spat out by the markdown parser, and converts into strings. ie. anchor node -> <a href={node.href}>node.content</a>
• You can find the default writer in src/writer/default.lua

2. Finds all the files in the post directory
3. Assumes they're all markdown, and parses it *There's a TODO to filter it down to markdown only, when that matters)
4. Uses the nodes from the parse, and writes them as strings. Fetches post metadata from the preamble node - things like title, date and tags
5. Generates the head element by using the template, and metadata
6. Generates the post using the template, and outputs from the markdown parse.
7. Writes this file to build/posts/<title>.html
8. Repeats steps 3->7 for every post. Collects a list of all the posts
9. Render the index using the list of posts
10. Done!