A damn simple static website generator.
a4d630823083 draft — Oben Sonne default tip 4 years ago
Remove minor redundancies in macros importing
9f946a2aa809 draft — Oben Sonne 4 years ago
Fix sys.executable usage
c8a7030a105a draft — Edd Barrett 4 years ago
Use the same Python for tests as the test runner was invoked with.

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#Poole

Create simple websites fast, now.

Poole is an easy to use Markdown driven static website generator. You write the content of your pages in Markdown and Poole creates a nice and simple site with a navigation menu. You don't need to learn a template or preprocessing engine.

Though Poole is made for simple sites, it has basic support for content generation by embedding Python code in page source files. This is a dirty merge of content and logic but for simple sites it's a pragmatic way to get things done fast and easy -- if you know Python you're ready to start.

Check the list of sites built with Poole (and feel free to add yours).

builds.sr.ht status

#Getting Started

Clone or download (tgz) the repository, run make to set up a virtual env, then make Poole easily runnable via an alias:

$ hg clone https://hg.sr.ht/~obensonne/poole /some/where/poole
$ cd /some/where/poole
$ make
$ alias poole=/some/where/poole/poole.py

TIP: You might want to add the last command to your ~/.bashrc.

Create and build a site project:

$ mkdir /path/to/site/project
$ cd /path/to/site/project
$ poole --init --theme minimal
$ poole --build
$ poole --serve

Done. You've just created a website! Browse http://localhost:8080/ and watch the example pages which have been created during initialization. To write your own pages, use the example pages in the input folder as a starting point.

Next to the minimal theme, there are some other choices available.

Run poole --build whenever you've made some changes in the input folder.

#How It Works

Poole takes files from a project's input directory and copies them to the output directory. In this process files ending with md, mkd, mdown or markdown get converted to HTML using the project's page.html as a template (unless a custom template is set on an individual page).

Additionally Poole expands any macros used in a page. Don't care about that for now ..

When running poole.py --build in a Poole project, an input directory like this:

|- input
    |- index.md
    |- news.mkd
    |- foo.mdown
    |- images
        |- bar.png

will result in an output folder like that:

|- output
    |- index.html
    |- news.html
    |- foo.html
    |- images
        |- bar.png

#Page Layout

Every Poole page is based on the skeleton file page.html. Hence adjusting the site layout means adjusting page.html and extending or replacing its CSS file input/poole.css.

The only thing you should keep in page.html is the embedded {{__content__}} expression. Below is an almost minimal page.html file. It does not look nice but it's a clean starting point to build your own layout from scratch.

Minimal page.html:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf8" />
  </head>
  <body>
    {{ __content__ }}
  </body>
</html>

It's easy to apply one of the numerous free CSS templates out there to a Poole site. For more information read this blog post with step-by-step instructions.

In case you need special templates for individual pages, you can add the property tempalte in the front matter of each page:

title: This looks different
template: a-special-page-template.html
---

In that case the given file is used as the page template instead of the default page.html file.

#Content Generation

Poole allows you to embed Python code in your pages to generate content:

input/some-page.md:

Here is normal text in *markdown* flavor.
{%
print "hello poole"
%}
Did you know? The sum of 2 and 2 is {{ 2 + 2 }}.

This example demonstrates two ways to embed Python code, either as statements or as expressions:

  1. Everything between {% and %} are statements and whatever is printed to stdout during their execution is going to be part of the final HTML page.
  2. Everything between {{ and }} are expressions and their evaluation is going to be part of the final page.

TIP: Instead of the outer curly brackets { and } you can also use <!-- and --> to prevent syntax highlighting markdown editors from getting confused by the Python code.

TIP: To print the code surrounding tags literally, simply escape the opening tag with a backslash.

#Outsource complex or frequently used code

To keep embedded code short and compact or to reuse it in several pages, it can be outsourced into a file called macros.py in a project's root folder (where the page.html file is located). Every public attribute in macros.py is available within embedded Python code blocks:

macros.py:

from datetime import date
def today():
    return date.today().strftime("%B %d, %Y")

author = "Popeye"

input/some-page.md:

This site has been updated on {{ today() }} by {{ author }}.
#Builtin macros

Builtin macros can be used from the macros module as well as from python code in your pages and templates (just as if they are defined within your macros.py).

Currently, there is only one builtin macro available.

hx(s)

Replace the characters that are special within HTML (&, <, > and ") with their equivalent character entity (e.g., &amp;). This should be called whenever an arbitrary string is inserted into HTML (i.e. use {{ hx(variable) }} instead of {{ variable }}). You do not need this within a markdown context.

Note that " is not special in most HTML, only within attributes. However, since escaping it does not hurt within normal HTML, it is just escaped unconditionally.

The wiki goes a bit more into detail on macros.

#Working with pages

Next to stuff defined in macros.py the objects page and pages are available in embedded Python code. The first one is a dictionary describing the page in which the code is embedded. The second one is a list of all pages in the project.

The following attributes are always set in a page dictionary:

  • title: The page's title, by default its filename without extension (setting alternatives is described in the next section).
  • fname: Path to the page's source file, e.g. /path/to/project/input/stuff/news.md.
  • url: The page's relative URL, e.g. for a source page input/stuff/news.md this is stuff/news.html.

The example page.html file in a freshly initialized site project uses a page's title attribute:

...
<div id="header">
     <h1>a poole site</h1>
     <h2>{{ page["title"] }}</h2>
</div>
...

TIP: All items in a page dictionary are exposed as attributes, i.e. page["foobar"] is identical to page.foobar. Dictionary access is useful if an item may not be set, e.g.: page.get("foobar", "...").

#Setting page attributes

Page attributes can be set at the top of a page's source file, in Python's configuration file style. They are delimited from the page's content by a line with 3 or more dashes.

input/stuff/news.md:

title: Hot News
foobar: King Kong
---
Here are some news about {{ page.foobar }}.
Did I say {% print(page.foobar) %}?

That way you can also set a page's title explicitly, instead of using the file name. Other useful attributes to set are description and keywords, which get used by the default page.html file to set HTML meta tags. Here it comes in handy to set default page attributes in the macros.py file:

macros.py:

page = { "description": "some stuff", "keywords": "stuff" }

That way you can safely use the description and keywords attributes without bothering if they are really defined in every page.

#Accessing page objects in the macros module

The objects pages and page are also available within macros.py. That means you can define them as dummys and reference them in macros.py. Poole updates them when loading the macros module.

macros.py:

page = {} # you can also set defaults here, see previous section
pages = []

def something():
    # when executing this, the page and pages objects above are up-to-date
    print page["title"]

#Options and paths

Similarly to page and pages the following objects are available within embedded Python code and within the macros module:

  • options: The command line arguments given to Poole as parsed by Python's optparse module. For instance the base URL can be retrieved by options.base_url.
  • project: Path to the project's root directory.
  • input: Path to the project's input directory.
  • output: Path to the project's output directory.

#Custom file converters

If you use LESS or CleverCSS you'll be happy about the possibility to define custom converters Poole applies to selected files in its building process. Custom converters may be defined in macros.py using a dictionary named 'converter' with file name patterns as keys and a converter function as well as a target file name extension as values:

converter = {
    r'\.ccss': (ccss_to_css, 'css'),
    ...
}

The converter function ccss_to_css must accept the source file name and the destination file name as arguments. The destination file name is a suggestion (the source filename mapped to the project's output directory with the extension given in the converter dictionary) - you are free to choose another one:

import clevercss

def ccss_to_css(src, dst):
    # when `src` is '/path/to/project/input/foo.ccss'
    # then `dst` is '/path/to/project/output/foo.css'
    ccss = open(src).read()
    css = clevercss.convert(ccss)
    open(dst, 'w').write(css)

#Pre- and post-convert hooks

All pages converted by Poole may be processed by custom code in macros.py using hook functions. In particular, any function whose name starts with hook_preconvert_ is run after source markdown files have been parsed but not yet converted. Similarly, any function whose name starts with hook_postconvert_ is run after the content of pages has been converted to HTML (but still without the skeleton HTML given in the project's page.html file).

Pre-convert hooks are useful to preprocess the markdown source and/or to generate new virtual pages based on existing real pages:

def hook_preconvert_foo():
    # important: replace all foos by bars in every page
    for p in pages:
        p.source = p.source.replace("foo", "bar")
    # create a new virtual page which still has a foo
    p = Page("foo.md", virtual="The only page with a *foo*.", title="Foony")
    pages.append(p)

Virtual pages can be created by providing a virtual source filename relative to the project's input folder and corresponding markdown content. Page attributes (e.g. title) may be given as additional keyword arguments but may also be encoded in the markdown source as in real markdown input files.

A common use case for post-convert hooks is to generate full content RSS feeds:

def hook_postconvert_rss():
    # this is kind of pseudo code
    rss = ...
    for p in pages:
        rss.add_item(..., r.html)
    rss.save(".../rss.xml")

More practical and detailed usage examples of hooks and virtual pages can be found in the recipes.

#Recipes

You can do some pretty fancy and useful things with inlined Python code and the macros module, for instance generate a list of blog posts or create an RSS file. Check out the example recipes.

#Feedback and Contributions

Please use the mailing list at https://lists.sr.ht/~obensonne/poole for patches and general questions. No idea how to contribute via a mailing list? Read this !.