Static Shock - A static site generator, written in Dart

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For documentation, visit staticshock.io

Static Shock CLI

The static_shock_cli package is the command-line interface for static_shock.

Activate static_shock_cli from Pub

dart pub global activate static_shock_cli

Activate static_shock_cli from your machine

Activate the local package from anywhere on your machine:

dart pub global activate --source=path /MY_ROOT_PATH/static_shock/static_shock_cli/

Activate the local package from the root of this repository:

dart pub global activate --source=path ./static_shock_cli/

Activate the local package from the static_shock_cli directory:

dart pub global activate --source=path .

Project Templates

The Static Shock CLI helps users get started by creating an initial project structure. The user can choose from multiple options, e.g., blog, documentation, empty. Each of these starting project structures are called project templates.

Each template requires 3 representations:

  • A buildable/runnable version to verify the correctness of the template.
    • Located at /template_sources/**
  • A Mason "brick" version with values replaced by Mustache variables so it can be configured by users.
    • Located at /static_shock_cli/templates/**
  • A Mason "bundle", which reduces the "brick" down to a single file to be included in the CLI package.
    • Located at /static_shock_cli/lib/templates/**

Update a template for distribution

From time to time, it may be necessary to alter a Static Shock project template. To do this, follow these three steps:

  1. Update and verify the correctness of the runnable template under /static_shock_cli/template_sources/**.
  2. Copy the new/changed files from the runnable template and overwrite the the files in /static_shock_cli/templates/.
  3. In the template files you just pasted in /static_shock_cli/templates/, find and replace every hard-coded value with a variable. For changed files, you'll need to inspect the original files to ensure that you recover whatever variables you just overwrote.
  4. Use mason to compile the template and overwrite the existing bundle file in /static_shock_cli/lib/templates/.

Working with templates

Static Shock uses Mason to structure and read templates for project generation. Those templates are stored under:

/templates/**

Dart CLI packages don't have an asset management system. Instead, a Dart CLI package must include any desired asset files under /lib. This creates an issue with Dart project templates because the Dart build system would treat the template's source files as actual project files. This would blow up the compiler in areas where we insert code generation values at runtime. For this reason, we store templates outside the /lib directory.

To make the Brick templates usable by static_shock_cli as runtime, we have to "bundle" each template into a single file. Those bundled versions of each template are stored under:

/lib/templates/**

The bundled template files are shipped with the package. The full template directories are not.

To bundle a Brick directory into a single file, use:

mason bundle path/to/brick/directory

For example, to update the existing template for blog, first run:

mason bundle templates/blog

The bundle will be generated at the root of that package. The bundle then needs to be moved to its final location at lib/templates/blog.bundle.

Mason uses Mustache templates to insert values in source file content and file names. Static Shock uses Jinja templates, which also use "{{" and "}}" to insert values. Jinja brackets inside of Mason templates need to use "mustache case" syntax to keep Mason from processing the Jinja variables:

{{#mustacheCase}} myVar {{/mustacheCase}}

Libraries

static_shock_cli