Geny

A small and efficient static site generator written in Go.

Installation

You can install geny by downloading the latest release from the releases page.

Building from source

You need to have Golang installed in order to build Geny from source.

1. Clone: git clone git@github.com:Yendric/geny.git
2. Build: go build
3. Run: ./geny

Geny

Geny is a very simple static site generator written in golang. It's goal is to be very efficient and easy to use. It uses gohtml for templating, and markdown for content.
https://yendric.be is made entirely using Geny.

Usage instructions

Defining templates

Templates are defined by creating a new file in the templates directory. The filename should be: <name>.html, and the file should contain valid gohtml code. Per convention, you should put shared templates in the templates/shared directory. This is only a convention, you are free to put templates anywhere you want, as long as they are in the templates directory and not deeper than 1 level.

Accessing data

The current contentFile can be accessed using:

• {{ .Content }} for its content as html
• {{ .RawContent }} for its content as markdown
• {{ .Url }} to link to its page
• {{ .MetaData }} for metadata, which you can define yourself (see creating content)
• {{ .Template }} for info about the template (eg. .Template.Name)
• {{ .Collections }} to access all other collections.
  A collection is a slice of contentFiles belonging to the same template.
  For example, if you have a template called post, you can access all posts using {{ .Collections.post }}
• {{ .Path }} for the filepath
• {{ .FileName }} for the filename

Utility functions

Geny provides a few utility functions that can be used in templates:

• Truncate(string) truncates a string to 150 characters.
• StripTags(string) removes all html tags from a string.
• GetCurrentYear() returns the current year.

Collections also have helper methods on them:

• Collection.Slice(start, end) returns a slice of the collection.
• Collection.SortByDate() returns a new collection, sorted by date.

Creating content and routes

Defining routes

Routes are entirely defined by the directory and file structure in the content directory.

For example: content/posts/hello-world.md will be available at /posts/hello-world. The main page for a directory is defined by the index.md file in that directory.

It is possible to structure content in directories without defining new routes, by prefixing the directory name with an underscore. For example: content/_posts/hello-world.md will be available at /hello-world.

Special routes

As mentioned above, the index.md file in a directory defines the main page for that directory.

If you name a file 404.md, it will be rendered as 404.html instead of 404/index.html. This way, services like cloudflare pages can automatically detect the 404 page.

Creating content

Content files use markdown and should start with a header, which is defined by a yaml block surrounded by --- at the top of the file. There is one required field: template. This field should contain the name of the template to use for rendering the content (without .html).

Other fields can be defined as desired, and can be referenced in templates using {{ .MetaData.<field> }}

Example:

---
template: index
title: Yendrics blog - Home
---
# Content

PS: the markdown renderer also supports styled code blocks.

Generating your site

To generate your site, run geny build in the root of the project. This will generate a build directory containing the generated site.
You can also watch for changes using geny watch.
Both commands accept an optional --serve flag, which will start a local server on port 8080 to serve the generated site until stopped. The port can be changed using the --port flag.

Example: geny build --serve --port 3000

Dealing with css and static content

CSS and other static files can be placed in the public directory. These files will be copied to the root of the generated site.

It it possible to configure a build step in the --run flag.
For example: geny build --run "npm run build" will run npm run build in the root of the project before generating the site.