gazetta

Gazetta is a static site generator written in rust. There are four parts:

1. Horrorshow, a rust-macro based HTML generator.
2. The framework. This set of libraries contains the bulk of the logic and is responsible for generating models and views from your site's data files.
3. The renderer. This is where the logic to actually render the html lives. If you need fine control over your website's html, you should fork this repo. However, 99% of the time, you should be able to sufficiently customize your site without modifying this project.
4. Your website data. This includes both your website's content and assets (stylesheets/javascript). You can find mine here and a simple example site for bootstrapping here.

Platforms

I've only tested Gazetta on 64bit Linux but it should work on all *nix platforms. However, it probably won't work on windows (I assume forward slashes in paths). Patches welcome!

Quick Start

1. Download and compile gazetta-bin (cargo build --release). Build in release mode unless you want to pay a 15x-30x performance penalty.
2. Fork and clone gazetta-bootstrap.
3. Edit the config, homepage, and theme to your liking.
4. Create some new pages either manually or by using the gazetta binary. For example: gazetta new blog "Hello World" will create a hello world blog post.
5. Run gazetta render /path/to/output (anywhere in the repository) to render your website.

Data Directory Layout and File Format

That's your website data.

Config

gazetta.yaml

This is the website's core config. It can be used to specify shared variables available when rendering any page on the site. It must specify:

• title: the website's title.
• base: the website's base url.

If you're using the default renderer (gazetta-bin), you must also specify an author (see the Person section) format:

And may specify a set of navigational links:

nav:
# If relative, href is relative to the site base.
  - title: href

Assets

/
└── assets/
    ├── javascript/
    │   ├── 0-example1.js
    │   └── 1-example2.js
    ├── stylesheets/
    │   ├── 0-example1.css
    │   └── 1-example2.css
    └── icon.png

All files are optional.

• icon.png: The website's icon.
• javascript: The website's javascript files. They will be concatenated in lexicographical on build.
• stylesheets: The website's stylesheets. They will be concatenated in lexicographical on build.

All other files in assets will be ignored.

Entries

An entry consists of:

1. A mandatory index file (index.txt, index.html, or index.md).
2. An optional static directory containing static files.
3. Any number of child entries.

All index files must have a yaml header. This header must include a title and anything else required by your specify renderer. By default, the header may also include:

• date: A date in the format YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM+HH:MM (RFC 3339).
• index: This indicates that the current page is an index. If specified, all children will be appended to the page as sub pages. See indexing for more information.
• cc: Link this page into the specified index page as if it were a child. This is useful for making pages show up in multiple tags/categories.

If you're using the default renderer, the header may also include:

• author: The page author.
• about: This field indicates that this page is about someone. The provided person information will be rendered at the top of the page.

Directories and files inside the static directory will be copied as-is to the output directory. This is a good place to put per-page static media.

Indexing

The index field can either be a boolean or a table with the following optional fields:

# The sort direction and field: [+-](date|title)
sort: date

# How many entries to list per page or false to not paginate.
paginate: false

# The directories to include in the index (in addition to explicitly CCed
# entries).
directories: .

# The maximum number of entries to include in the index or false to include all
# entries.
max: false

Person

When specifying people, you can either just write their name or use the following table:

name: My Name # Mandatory
email: email
photo: photo
key: pgp_key_url
nicknames:
  - first nick
  - second nick
also: # A list of profiles around the web.
 - "GitHub": github_url # example
 - "reddit": reddit_profile_url  # example

Code quality

I'm happy with the overall architecture but some of the code could use a little love (the main render function is especially atrocious). Again, patches welcome.

Performance

Gazetta is pretty damn fast; there's a reason I don't bother displaying progress. However, there is room for improvement:

1. Gazetta makes a lot of system calls (file IO). We could probably reduce this significantly. On my machine, more then half the runtime is system time.

2. yaml-rust is slow (according to callgrind). I've considered toml but switching would be a pain.

3. The index building algorithm is Θ(num_indices*num_entries). This could be reduced to Θ(num_entries) however, num_indices is usually rather low so this only makes sense if we can keep the constant multiplier in the new algorithm's runtime low.

4. Do we even care? My website (~75 pages) builds in 50ms on my laptop.