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A static blog generator and an offline blogging tool.

Project description

Fatafat is a minimalistic static blog generator written in Python. It is also an offline blogging tool with simple and quick publishing options.

With Fatafat you can …

  • Write blog articles in Markdown.

  • Publish an article to a remote host (currently Github) using a single command.

  • Test changes to blog theme, blog articles in a local dev version of your blog.

  • Focus more on writing!

Installation

To install fatafat, simply:

$ pip install fatafat

Prerequisites

Git

Make sure that git is installed.

Generate ssh keys

Currently Github is the only remote host which is supported. To publish to Github from command line, you will need to setup your ssh keys. Read details here.

Create empty Github project

Fatafat pushes to the repository github_username.github.io. Make sure that the empty repository (DO NOT create the readme or the .gitignore files) is created before you use Fatafat.

Why the name “Fatafat”?

I say why not! “Fatafat” means “quick” in Hindi.

Found issues?

Currently, Fatafat is a “toddler” project and barely stands! But I have honest plans for it. I am developing it actively and using it for my own blog.

Incase you run into issues, please log the same.

If you find the project useful, why not look into the issues yourself and send pull requests!

Usage

Command Line Interface

When installed, fatafat command is available for use. This command can be used to perform various actions on the blog. Run fatafat --help for details. To get help on individual action, run fatafat <action> --help. Note that the fatafat command must be run at the root of the directory which contains your blog.

This cheatsheet lists all possible actions that can be performed using the fatafat command.

Creating a new blog

First create the empty Github repository github_username.github.io.

To create a new blog in bubblewrap directory:

$ mkdir bubblewrap
$ cd bubblewrap
$ fatafat start

The start option prompts the user for blog configuration details. The following details are requested:

Once done, the following directories will be created:

bubblewrap
|-- contents
|-- prod
|-- dev

All articles go into the contents directory. The directory structure for prod and dev is same and stores the production version and the development version of the blog.

|-- config.py           # blog configuration file
|-- data                # blog data files
|-- site                # static output
|   |-- README.md
|   |-- articles        # generated HTML files for articles
|   |-- assets          # css, js files
|-- themes
|   |-- simi
|   |   |-- assets      # css, js files
|   |   |-- templates   # jinja2 templates

There are few important differences between the dev and the prod directory.

  • config.py in both directories are setup such that the URLs generated in the static output is correct i.e. local URL for dev and remote URL for prod. This helps because you can run python -m SimpleHTTPServer in dev/site or prod/site to see and navigate through the changes you made to your blog

  • site directory in prod is a git repository.

Add a new article

To add a new article, simply create a new file with .md extension under contents. Articles belonging to a common theme can be grouped in a directory. E.g.

$ cd bubblewrap
$ vim contents/loner.md
$ vim contents/python/meta_what.md
$ vim contents/python/why_should_i_decorate.md

Each article has associated metadata, some required and some optional. The metadata starts from the first line of the document and is separated from the article content by a blank line.

E.g. contents/loner.md can look like -

Title: I am a lonely article
Summary: My story
Date: 27-07-1983
Status: draft

I am lonely, because I am at the root!

Title and Date are required. Currently Date must be in DD-MM-YYYY format. Support for other formats could be added later.

Summary and Status are optional. If Status is absent, the article is considered to be published.

Publish article(s)

To publish an article, cd to the root of the blog directory and run fatafat publish -f <rel_path_to_article> in terminal. E.g -

$ cd <path_to_blog>
$ fatafat publish -f contents/loner.md

That’s it!

The above command will update the local development blog only. To update the production blog specify option --prod. To push the changes to Github, specify option --sync. See cheatsheet for more details.

$ cd <path_to_blog>
$ fatafat publish -f contents/loner.md --prod --sync

To publish more than one article, pass the relative paths of the all the articles to the fatafat publish -f command. E.g -

$ cd <path_to_blog>
$ fatafat publish -f contents/loner.md contents/python/meta_what.md

To publish all articles, simply use fatafat publish. E.g -

$ cd <path_to_blog>
$ fatafat publish

Removing an article

Currently, removing an article or renaming a markdown file isn’t handled entirely correctly. The HTML file generated for the deleted/renamed article remains in the site directory and has to be removed manually.

This is on the top of my list of TODOs. So it should be addressed soon.

Themes

Currently Fatafat comes with the default theme simi. But you add new themes easily.

  • Create a directory similar to the default theme and put in under the themes directory of your blog.

  • Update the THEME field in config.py to use the new theme.

Every theme has two folders, assets and templates. assets stores the javascript and the css files. templates stores the jinja2 templates used to generate the static output. Currently fatafat looks for index.jinja2 and article.jinja2 under the templates directory.

The following variables are available in template article.jinja2:

  • article.title

  • article.summary

  • article.content

  • article.date

The following variables are available in template index.jinja2:

  • articles - which is a list of articles. Each article has the same attributes as above.

The following variables are available in all templates:

  • SITENAME - blog title

  • SITEURL - blog URL

You might have observed that the template variables names matches to those in Pelican. The goal is to make pelican themes compatible with fatafat.

Cheatsheet

The fatafat command must be run at the root of the directory which stores the blog files. The following commands can be run in terminal to perform various actions on the blog:

# Create a new blog
$ fatafat start

# Publish all articles to dev directory
$ fatafat publish

# Publish a single article to dev directory
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md

# Publish multiple articles to dev directory
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md contents/group/article2.md contents/article3.md

# Publish all articles to prod directory
$ fatafat publish --prod

# Publish all articles to prod directory and sync with remote host
$ fatafat publish --prod --sync

# Publish a single article to prod directory
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md --prod

# Publish a single article to prod directory and sync with remote host
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md --prod --sync

# Publish multiple articles to prod directory
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md contents/group/article2.md --prod

# Publish multiple articles to prod directory and sync with remote host
$ fatafat publish -f contents/article1.md contents/group/article2.md --prod --sync

Contact / Feedback

Send me a message at “i DOT subhajit DOT ghosh AT gmail DOT com” with any feedback.

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