gullap

gullap is a Microsoft .NET/Mono based static website generator.

Features

• Based on Mono it works on Windows and Linux
• Supports Markdown markup
• Supports Mustache templating engine
• Supports YAML Front Matter
• Include HTML to your markup files
• Site structure generation
• Generate single files/posts
• Support of pages and posts
• Support of static HTML files

Extensibility

There are two interfaces IParser (per default one for Markdown is implemented) and ITemplater (per default one for Nustache is implemented). They can be used to replace the defaults by other markup and templating engines.

How To

Download the binaries or compile the solution. For that, can either use MonoDevelop or Microsoft Visual Studio.

There are the following options to call gullap:

GullapConsole -i my/Path/To/My/Site
GullapConsole -g my/Path/To/My/Site
GullapConsole -g
GullapConsole -f my/Path/To/A/File

The argument -i generates the necessary structure within my/Path/To/My/Site. Therefore the target path has to exist. It is not created by gullap. The file structure looks like the following

Site
|- assets
|- output
|- pages
|- posts
|- templates

Copy all your necessary assets (CSS, JavaScript, Images) into assets. They will be copied to the output directory as they are. So, if you have sub directories they will be available also within the output directory. The pages directory contains your markup. Per default they should contain all your Markdown files (the extension of your files is unimportant, as all files are taken for the transformation). Put all your Nustache templates to the templates directory.

After you filled up the structure with all necessary files, call GullapConsole with argument -g and the path to your site directory. Everything will be generated to the output directory. In case you use -g without giving a site path, the current directory will be used as the site path.

Using the parameter -f you can define a single file to be builded. The parameter needs a file path. This can either be an absolute path, a relative one or just the filename. In that case the first file matching the given name will be built, so take care if there are more having this name.

Use GullapConsole -h you can show help information. Add -v to your commands to get the full output.

YAML Front Matter

Since version 1.1 Gullap uses a YAML Front Matter (as for example Jekyll does. Each file that has a valid front matter will be processed. The following front matter attributes are currently available for pages:

title 			Title of the page
description		Description of the page
author			Author of the page
category 		The category of the page
template 		A specific template to use
date			Creation/update date of the page
tags 			Keywords for your page
draft			Defines whether this page is in draft mode or not
filename		Target file name (e.g. rss.xml)

The same attributes are available for posts, except description.

There is one template that MUST exist: page.template. This is the default template. Use template to override that.

Here is an example of a valid front matter:

---
title: DEVTYR
description: The Home of DevTyr
author: DevTyr / Norbert Eder
tags: 
    - DevTyr
    - Tools
    - Projects
    - Norbert Eder
template: page
---

Everything after the front matter is processed as page content.

.html and .htm files having no valid front matter won't be parsed, just copied.

Variables available for templating

Within your templates there are information on site level as well for the current page available.

site

The site section contains the following possibilities:

• config
• time
• pages
• pageCategories
• posts
• postCategories

config contains the site's configuration that can be defined in the file config.yml. This is an optional configuration. Currently only the site title can be set (attribute name title). time represents the date/time of the generation. pages contains all pages (the available attributes are the same as defined by the YAML front matter). categories is a dictionary containing the pages mapped to their category.

current

This is the page that is currently rendered. It contains all attributes that are specified in the YAML front matter. In addition you have access to url and categorypages. categorypages is a list of all pages placed within the same category as the current one.

Please note: It is currently not possible to define custom attributes. It won't break anything if you do it, but you can't access them within your template at the moment.

As an example see the template that is used to build the detail page including a sidebar of devtyr.com:

<div class="container">

  <div class="row-fluid">
      <div class="span2">
      	  <ul class="nav nav-list">
      	  	<li><span class="label label-primary">{{current.category}}</span></li>
      	  </ul>
		  <ul class="nav nav-list">
		  	{{#current.categorypages}}
		  		<li><a href="{{url}}">{{title}}</a></li>
		  	{{/current.categorypages}}
		  </ul>
	  </div>

	  <div class="span8">
	  	{{{current.content}}}
	  </div>

  </div>

  <hr>

</div>

The complete templates and input files for devtyr.com can be viewed here. This should help you to get an overview of how Gullap works.