Blake: Static Site Generator

Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Documentation

Blake is an opinionated static site generator written in Dart lang. It is provided as a single binary and can be used even without Dart installed.

Features as of now:

• Markdown support.
• YAML configuration and front-matter.
• Jinja templates. Also usable in Markdown files.
• Live-reload during development.
• Compiled into single native binary.
• YAML/JSON data content and non-public Data pages.
• Pre-defined content types for quick creation.
• Generated JSON search index.
• sitemap.xml generation.
• Inline & body shortcodes.

Remember that this project is WIP. Everything can change at any time.

Install

You can download compiled binary on release page. Builds are currently done manually and not every platform (i.e. Windows/Mac/Linux) will be available for each release.

Another option is using pub global activate blake.

Usage

Use blake init to setup a new project in the current directory. blake init <name> will setup the project inside the <name> directory.

Use blake build to generate the site from your files. By default, generated files will be outputted into the public folder.

Use blake serve to start a webserver to see your site instantly. The site will be rebuilt every time you change files in your project and the browser tab will be reloaded automatically.

Use blake new to create new content based on types defined in types folder.

And as usual, blake or blake help will show usage help.

Structure

content directory contains all Markdown files which will be transformed into HTML files.

static directory files will be copied into the public folder without change.

public contains generated files.

templates should contain templates which will be used to process Markdown files inside content.

data contains YAML/JSON files which you can use inside templates.

types is used by the new command to quickly create content.

config.yaml configures build options for your site.

Build

You can build Blake into a single native binary. As of now, this binary can only be run on the same platform it was built on. Once compiled, you can run Blake without needing to install Dart SDK.

To compile this project, you need to install grinder package.

pub global activate grinder

Then you can run the grind compile script to produce a native binary together with an archive. This command will output a binary and an archive into the build directory.

grind compile

You can also run this project without compiling it to the binary.

dart bin/blake.dart

Or you can activate Blake globally from a local path which is useful during development.

pub global activate --source path .