Anodize NPM | npm.io

Anodize is a static site generator that allows you to create no-frills websites from simple templates. It has several useful website features built-in; the philosophy is to have sane defaults rather than to allow excessive configuration.

Differentiating features:

Templating within markdown: Anodize will parse templates inside the body of your markdown files, for things like lists of pages or files
Incremental regeneration (beta): Automatically skip re-rendering files that haven't changed
Global variables: Declare variables in your configuration file and access them anywhere

Getting started:

$ npm install -g anodize
$ cd your/website/directory
$ anodize init

How it works

Anodize stores all config in the .anodize.yml file in the project root folder, which is assumed to be the current working directory unless the -i flag is passed.

There are three subdirectories in the project root:

template stores Liquid templates for rendering the website.
src stores all of the source files.
gen is the output folder for the rendered HTML. The name of each of these folders is configurable in .anodize.yml under the keys template, source, target respectively.

Source folder

Files in the source folder are either markdown files (everything with a .md extension) or static files (everything else). Static files are simply copied over to the target directory under the same relative path.

Markdown format

Markdown parsing is done by ShowdownJS. Each file contains:

a YAML header
one line with only ---
a markdown body

title: My first post
sort: 5
some_key: true
this:
- is
- yaml
---
## this is markdown
Anything here can be templated in Liquid. For example: this is {{ keys.some_key }}.

Index files (index.md) and other markdown files are treated differently.

Non-index files

The header can contain any keys with any values, except for the following special keys:

title is used in the HTML <title> tag, through the titleTemplate (see below) if present
date if in the format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM is parsed into a Unix timestamp
draft is a boolean that indicates the current file is a draft and should not be rendered, allowing you to include the file in version control without displaying it in production
head represents the HTML head. Currently only supported for internal use, so consider this key reserved.
regen is a boolean that enables site-wide access in the body template. This flag tells Anodize to regenerate this file regardless of changes when doing incremental regeneration.
keywords is an array of keywords to be placed in the <meta keywords> html tag.
layout identifies the name of the template file, and if not present, Anodize will look for a file with the name of the parent directory and the .liquid extension. /foo/bar.md will default to <template directory>/foo.liquid.

Standard markdown files have access to the following keys through templates in their body.

keys is the header object of the file
global is the object declared under the key of the same name in .anodize.yml
id is the filename of the current file
path is the path that the current file will be accessible at after generation
dirname is the name of the parent directory, or _root if the file is in the website root.
site is accessible if regen is enabled in the header. It is an object with keys in the format path/to/directory and values { filename: file_object }. Many of the file_object properties are internal, but naturally the header is accessible under file_object.keys. For example, if I wanted to enumerate the files in a directory foo/bar:

{% assign dir = site['foo/bar'] | sortItems %}
{% for f in dir %}{{ f.id }}{% endfor %}

The Liquid filter sortItems is provided to convert objects into arrays and sort based on the sort key if present, or alphanumerically otherwise.

Index files

Index files have access to the same keys as regular files, with the following differences:

sortBy tells the sortItems filter which key to sort the folder by
no-regen is used instead of regen for conciseness; index files are regenerated by default, and no-regen disables this behavior. So site is accessible by default in index files.
layout defaults to index.liquid rather than the name of the parent directory.

Index files are also discard by the sortItems filter for convenience.

All markdown files are output as the index file of their own directory; this is known as a 'pretty url.' /foo/bar/baz.md will be output to /foo/bar/baz/index.html and can be located by a browser at https://example.com/foo/bar/baz/.

Templates

Anodize uses the Liquid templating language through liquidjs.

Server

Anodize comes with live-server, a development webserver with live reloading. Just run
$ anodize serve
and open http://localhost:8000 in a browser.

Configuration

Settings are defined in a file named .anodize.yml, which is automatically created by running anodize init.

As previously stated the keys target, source, and template specify the locations of those directories.

The key ignore is an array of glob patterns to ignore. Default is all dotfiles **/.*.

The key head specifies the contents of the <head> tag. Available sub-keys and corresponding tags:

title: string, <title>
description: string, <meta name="description">
keywords: array, <meta name="keywords">
css: array of file paths, <link rel="stylesheet" href="path/to/file.css">
raw: array, inserts specified text into <head>.

The contents of the key global are available to the templating engine under the key global.

The key titleTemplate is a template for constructing html <title> tags. It is a string with a $0 where you want the page's title inserted. For example, the string $0 | Sid Mani's blog. Defaults to $0 (no templating).