The surprised and appalled sound ones makes learning that there is "Yet Another Build System".
YABS is a highly customizable system for creating build pipelines for static websites. Although it is inspired by systems like Pelican, Sphinx and Lektor, it works at a somewhat lower level, providing a maximum of flexibility to end users while eliminating elements like a stiff, complex content management engine. YABS is intended to provide a thin layer - a Python wrapper - around a number of popular tools for building static websites, allowing to rapidly build just about anything ranging from small single page sites to large and complex blogs.
YABS is based on a minimal plugin system core: Every piece of build functionality is isolated into individual plugins, which can be chained up into custom pipelines and configured in project-specific configuration files. If a certain functionality is not provided by an existing YABS plugin, it is trivial to write your own and add it to the system. Every plugin is a stand-alone Python module exposing one single method which must accept two things - a project context object and an options parameter. If a certain plugin happens to be too slow for a certain use case, it can easily be optimized without interfering with other functionality.
YABS currently offers plugins for the following common [static] website build steps:
- a cleanup routine, plowing the ground for new builds
- a templating engine (thin wrapper around Jinja2)
- a markdown processor (extended mistune)
- a data loader for YAML & JSON data (exposing data to the templating engine)
- a slugifier (turning headlines into valid IDs and filenames)
- building & embedding interactive plots with plotly and bokeh
- syntax highlighting (rendered at build time)
- math & formulas (rendered at build time)
- code compression (HTML, CSS)
- code obfuscation / minimization (JavaScript)
- code transpilers (between different versions of JavaScript; from SASS/SCSS to CSS)
- code validation (HTML)
- inclusion of third party libraries (JavaScript, CSS)
- processing of font files
- processing of image files
- static file repository
- a favicon generator
- a robots.txt generator
- a sitemap.xml generator
- a htaccess generator
- a HTTP server for testing
- a symlink creator
- content deployment based on sshfs/sftp
If it is required to repeatedly run a small subset of a build pipeline e.g. for debugging, it is perfectly possible to do so.
- Check out the latest source code of YABS from its git repository:
git checkout [...] - Change into the source folder of YABS:
cd yabs - Create a new empty virtual environment named
envwith Python 3.8 or better:python3 -m venv env - Install YABS:
make install - Activate the virtual environment:
source env/bin/activate
At a project root, first create a site.yaml configuration file. Once this has been done, you can use the following commands:
# Run the entire pipeline
yabs build
# Run a list of space-separated plugins
yabs run [plugins]
# Start the HTTP server
yabs server start
# Stop the HTTP server
yabs server stop
# Deploy the latest build to a pre-configured target
yabs deploy [target]