bangtext 0.2.2

A static site generator

A static site generator, powers marcyes.com

You run bang from the command line:

$ bang command --project-dir=...

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1 minute getting started

First, install bang:

$ pip install bang

Make a new project:

$ bang generate --project-dir=~/bang-quickstart

Then compile your new project:

$ bang compile --project-dir=~/bang-quickstart

And start up the development server to take a look at your new project:

$ bang serve --project-dir=~/bang-quickstart

Now, open a browser and load localhost:8000 to see your masterpiece, that’s it!

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Setup and Configuration

A bang site can have any folder structure and bang will check each folder for a markdown (extension .md) file, if it finds one named index.md it will not treat it like a blog post but just compile the folder to an index.html file. If it finds a markdown file with any other name, then it is considered a blog post with the file’s name being the title. So, it basically uses this structure for its posts, so if you have this file structure:

project-dir/
  input/
    2014/
      001-this-is-the-slug/
        This is the title of the blog post.md

It would compile down to a blog post with a title This is the title of the blog post available at the uri:

/2014/001-this-is-the-slug

Any other files (images or whatnot) will just be copied over to their respective locations.

Bang can be configured using environment variables, basically, any BANG_* environment variables wil be put into the configuration, here are a couple you might want to set:

BANG_HOST – the host of your website, this is used to generate urls and stuff.

BANG_METHOD – the http method to use (either http or https).

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Project directory

Your project directory is where all the magic happens. It has to contain a few folders:

input (required)

This is where all your blog posts go.

template (required)

This is where all your Jinja templates go, they are used to compile your blog posts to their final form.

output (optional)

This is the default output directory when the compile command is used with no --output-dir argument.

bangfile.py (optional)

You can add this file to configure bang when compiling:

# /project_dir/bangfile.py
name = "your site name"
description = "your site description"
host = "example.com"

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Plugins

bang includes a couple built-in plugins that you can include in your config.py file, to activate them per site:

# /project_dir/config.py

from bang.plugins import sitemap # to automatically generate a sitemap.xml file

from bang.plugins import feed # generate an rss feed at host/feed.rss for the last 10 posts

That’s it, once they are imported they will run when they need to.

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Commands

compile

Use this to compile your project-dir/input directory to the final form in the output-dir directory.

Compile your site using the default output directory:

$ bang compile --project-dir=...

That will place the compiled output to project-dir/output, you can also move the output directory to another location:

$ bang compile --project-dir=... --output-dir=...

serve

Use this to fire up a local server so you can see your compiled site. You can set the port with the --port flag.

$ bang server --project-dir=... --port=8000

watch

This is designed to be used on the remote server that will host your site in a cron job, it will try and pull down the code using a git repo, if there are changes, then it will compile the new changes, since it is run in cron, you should include the full path:

$ /usr/local/bin/bang watch --project-dir=...

generate

Generate a site skeleton that you can use as a starting point to your own bang site, this will take the project_dir and make sure it exists (or create it) and then add input and template dirs along with skeleton template files.

$ bang generate --project-dir=...

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Events

Events are callbacks that are fired at specific times.

The easiest way to hook these in to your site compiling is to define or import them into your bangfile.py configuration file. You can see examples of how they are used in the bang.plugins module.

Events are basically defined like this:

from .. import event, echo

def callback(event_name, site):
    """print all the post titles and urls to the screen"""
    for p in site.posts:
        echo.out(p.title)
        echo.err(p.url)

event.listen('output.finish', callback)

output.finish

This event is fired after all the posts are compiled, right now it is used to do things like generating RSS feeds and the sitemap.

dom.[TAGNAME]

This event is fired for every element in a post that matches, so if you wanted to do something with a tags, you could hook up a callback to listen on dom.a.

from .. import event, echo

def callback(event_name, parent, elem):
    """print all href urls in every a tag"""
    echo.out(elem.href)

event.listen('dom.a', callback)

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Install

Use pip:

pip install bangtext

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License

MIT

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TODO

The folders should allow tagging with #hashtags

a project should be able to include a plugins directory (python module) that will allow customization, there should be events added around all the major things during execution (eg, a post_compiled event, a pre_compile event) that the plugins module the user adds can hook into. Not sure this needed anymore though since you can configure the plugins in your bangfile.py file

http://pythonhosted.org/Markdown/extensions/api.html

index.html should be changed to post.html and aux.html to be more flexible.

would generate command be better as start or skeleton?