md2blog v0.2.3
md2blog
md2blig is a dead simple blog oriented static site generator, developed out of frustration with complex static site generators which attempt to be everything for everyone. This package is in beta, meaning breaking changes may occur until a 1.0.0 release. That being said, I do not expect the functionality for the current cli to change.
Installation
npm install -g md2blog
yarn install -g md2blog
Usage
$ md2blog --help
Options:
-V, --version output the version number
-h, --help output usage information
Commands:
generate [options] generate html from given files
scaffold scaffold an example md2blog configuration
md [options] generate a markdown document at the given file pathTutorial
Either install the package globally, or use npx to execute it without an installation.
We'll begin by running the scaffolding tool to get us going quickly. This will create ~/.md2blog where all the files required for the tool will live.
npx md2blog scaffold
You should see a directory similar to this:
$ tree ~/.md2blog
.md2blog
├── markdown
│ ├── about.md
│ ├── index.md
│ └── posts
│ └── 1565228333616.md
├── public
│ ├── about.html
│ ├── index.html
│ ├── posts
│ │ └── yourtitle.html
│ └── styles
│ └── style.css
├── styles
│ └── style.css
└── templates
├── about.ejs
├── head.ejs
├── index.ejs
└── posts
└── post.ejsmarkdown is where your markdown documents will live, and templates is where our .ejs templates will live. The directory structure is important, as it dictates the structure of our blog. Each document must have a template, which will correspond to a corrolary template. For example:
$ cat ~/.md2blog/markdown/index.md
---
title: index
template: index
timestamp: 1565228265541
require:
- posts
---
index content$ cat ~/.md2blog/templates/index.ejs
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<%- include('./head.ejs', {title: title, stylepath: "styles/style.css"}); %>
<body>
<% if (title) { %>
<h1>Hello, <%= title %></h1>
<% } else { %>
<h1> Hello, world </h1>
<% } %>
<% for (const post of required.posts) { %>
<a href="<%= post.href %>"><%= post.title %></a>
<% } %>
<%- content %>
</body>
</html>%Thus, our index template will have the variables title, template, timestamp, posts, and content available to it. posts is available via the require array, which lets us create a list of posts on our blog home page.
Now, lets generate our html. Run the following command:
md2blog generate
Observe that our /public directory is now populated with the html that compromises our blog:
$ tree ~/.md2blog/public
.md2blog/public
├── about.html
├── index.html
├── posts
│ └── yourtitle.html
└── styles
└── style.cssNow, lets add a new post. Run the following command to create a new post in our /posts directory:
md2blog md -t post
md2blog is smart enough to scaffold a new markdown file for us in the proper template directory when we specify the -t option. Not specifying the -t option will create a new markdown document in the root of /markdown. Running any command with -h or --help will give a full list of options for that particular command.
You should see a new file in your /markdown/posts directory:
$ tree ~/.md2blog/markdown/posts
.md2blog/markdown/posts
├── 1565228333616.md
└── 1565456985091.mdrun md2blog generate again to generate html with the newly created post.
From here, you can do whatever you'd like with the /public directory to get it onto your site. I host my blog on github pages, and use a simple bash script to copy the files over to my github pages repo:
#!/bin/sh
# Warning! This will make changes in your file system.
cp -a ~/.md2blog/public/. ./yoursitedirectory