zine
Yet another blog aware static site generator.
Warning: pre-release code
These are the very early days of zine, expect breaking changes.
Why yet another static blog engine?
Despite the proliferation in these things (450!) I still find it more comfortable to use my own tools.
Distinguishing features include:
- ERB templates
- Sass stylesheets
- fast incremental builds
- SFTP file uploads
Presented here in the hope it's of use to someone else too.
Installation
Install the gem.
$ gem install zine
To generate a new site scaffold, cd to a new folder and:
$ zine site
Then update your site's name, your name & so on in zine.yaml. Pay particular care to the Upload section, if you want to use Zine as an SFTP uploader to deploy files that've changed, you'll need to edit this section to include your remote server's details, as well as the path to a YAML file with your username & password (nil for that if you're using SSH without a password).
Day to day usage
To set up a new blog post:
$ zine post 'Your chosen title'
Your new post will have some fields set up in the YAML front matter, feel free to edit them too. Markdown files you create outside of the posts folder will be rendered into HTML in the same relative position in the build folder.
Once you're done writing, build your new site:
$ zine build # or zine force
Build only writes files for things that have changed while it's running, so the first time you build your site you should use force -- force writes all of the files (& so also uploads them all too if you've set up uploads).
Design & development
Typing zine style
will render the Sass file into CSS. The templates are all editable, as are the files' names, which you can change in the options file.
Halp!
To see the options available type zine & hit enter:
$ zine
Commands:
zine build # Build the site
zine force # Build the site, forcing writes & uploads
zine help [COMMAND] # Describe available commands or one specific command
zine notice POST # Build the site, then force the one POST
zine nuke # Delete the build folder
zine post TITLE # Create the file for a new blog post, titled TITLE
zine site # Create the skeleton of a new site (overwriting files)
zine style # Build the site's stylesheet
zine version # Show the version number
Up next
This is only a first cut at this gem, the stuff I considered a (barely) minimum viable product. Up next are:
- migration scripts from eg Jekyll? Maybe.
- Apple News
- much refactoring
- docs
- tests, lots of tests
- and a few other things
Contributing
Yes please. Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/mikekreuzer/zine.
Tests
bundle exec rspec spec # or your alias for that
License
The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.