flekky 0.4.1

Static website generator inspired by jekyll based on flask.

About

Flekky is a static website generator inspired by Jekyll but written in python and based on Flask. It is basically a wrapper around the excellent Frozen Flask and Flask FlatPages as described in this article by Nicolas Perriault.

So what does it do? It allows you to write templates, assets and contents for your website and bake all that into static HTML. You can than deploy that HTML on any webserver and do not have to worry about anything. Jinja2 is used for templating. Markdown is used for creating content.

There are many static website generators out there of which Jekyll is arguably the most popular. You are probably better of with that. But if you like Flask and have fun experimenting with things you might give Flekky a try.

Quickstart

$ pip install flekky
$ flekky init
$ flekky build

Basic Usage

To start a new project, run the init command:

$ flekky init

You can generate static HTML by using the build command:

$ flekky build

Flekky also comes with a built-in development server that will allow you to preview what the generated site will look like in your browser locally:

$ flekky serve

File structure

A basic Flekky site usually looks like this:

_source
├── pages
│   ├── index.md
│   └── test.md
├── static
│   ├── css
│   │   └── style.css
│   └── js
└── templates
    ├── base.html
    ├── layout
    │   ├── category.html
    │   ├── default.html
    │   ├── post.html
    │   └── tag.html
    └── partial.html

An overview of what each of them does:

• pages: Your dynamic content, so to speak. These are Markdown files, but they also contain some YAML data at the top. index.md is special because all its metadata is added to site , so you can use it to set the title of the complete website.

• static: Static files like CSS, JavaScript and images.

• templates: Each page can select a layout that is used to render that page. But you will probably also want to include a base.html that these layouts can extend and maybe some partials that can be included.

• Any additional files from the root folder that do not begin with an underscore (_) or dot (.) will be copied verbatim.

Command-line options

Flekky has several command-line options:

• general

  • --source: directory where Flekky will read files (default: _source)

  • --future: include pages with dates in the future (default: false)

  • --unpublished: include unpublished pages (default: false)

• build

  • --destination: directory where Flekky will write files (default: <source>_build)

• serve

  • --port: port to run at (default: 8000)

Variables

Flekky makes a variety of data available to the templating system. The following is a reference of the available data.

page

A page is a Markdown file in the pages folder. However, at the top of the file you can (and should) set some meta data using YAML syntax. All key-value pairs defined here will be available in the templates. But some fields also have a special meaning:

• title: Title for this page.

• layout: Select a template from the layout folder for rendering (default: default).

• published: Unpublished pages will not be included in the website. This can be disabled using the --unpublished command-line option.

• date: Pages with dates in the future are not included in the website. This can be disabled using the --future command-line option.

The content of a page can be accessed via its html attribute. However, in many cases you may want to shift all headings by one or two levels in order to fit the content into the document outline. This can be done by using fix_outline(baseheading_level).

site

The site object stores all data that applies to the whole project. This also includes any metadata from index.md.

• title: Title of the website.

• time: Current time. This can be used to display the time of the last build.

• pages: A list of all pages.

• config: The complete configuration.

Tags and Categories

Tags and categories are commonly used on websites. The site.pages object available in templates containes the functions by_key and values that can be used to implement them.

by_key will return only those pages that match the given key/value pair. So by_key('category', 'greeting') will return a list of all pages in category ‘greeting’. by_key('tags', 'example', is_list=True) will return all pages that have the ‘example’ tag. Note that tags should be a list, so the is_list argument is needed here.

values will return a list of all values that have been used with a given key. So values('category') will return a list with all categories and values('tags', is_list=True) will return a list with all tags.

These functions can be used to create a template for tag or category pages respectively. Note that tag and category pages will not be created automatically.

But these functions can not only be used for tags and categories. You can basically define any structure you want. Or you can filter by existing field, e.g. by layout.

Differences from Jekyll

Flekky aims at being very similar to Jekyll. However it is far from being a drop-in replacement. Some of the missing features might be added in the future. For now, these are some of the most important differences:

• written in python and based on Flask

• Markdown only (though it should be easy to extend)

• slightly different directory structure

  • no configuration file like _config.yml

  • templates instead of _includes and _layouts

  • pages instead of top level files and _posts

  • no drafts

  • no data files

  • date is not encoded in file name

• only pages that are linked to are included in the build

• no build-in SCSS or CoffeeScript support

• different (but similar) templating syntax

• no separators before and after YAML data in page files

• no build-in pagination

• no build-in plugin system but the rich Flask ecosystem

License

Copyright (C) 2014 Tobias Bengfort [e-mail]

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.