Gutenberg

An opinionated static site generator written in Rust.

Installation

You can get the latest release by going to the Release page. Alternatively, if you have the rust toolchain on your computer, you can also install it through Cargo: cargo install gutenberg.

Usage

Creating a new site

Use gutenberg init <a_directory_name>. This will create a folder with the name given and the base structure of a gutenberg site.

Working on a site

Use gutenberg serve to spin up a server that will automatically live reload any changes to the content, templates or static files.

Building a site

Use gutenberg build to generate the site in the public/ directory.

Gutenberg terms

Some words are going to be repeated in the docs so let's make sure they are clear.

• Page: a markdown file in the content directory that has a name different from _index.md
• Section: a group of pages in the content directory that has _index.md in the same folder

Configuration

Configuration is using the TOML language. Only 2 parameters are required: title and base_url. The other options are:

• highlight_code: Whether to highlight all code blocks found in markdown files. Defaults to false
• highlight_theme: Which themes to use for code highlighting. Defaults to "base16-ocean-dark"
• language_code: The language used in the site. Defaults to "en"
• generate_rss: Whether to generate RSS, defaults to false
• generate_tags_pages: Whether to generate tags and individual tag pages if some pages have them. Defaults to true
• generate_categories_pages: Whether to generate categories and individual category categories if some pages have them. Defaults to true

If you want to add some of your own variables, you will need to put them in the [extra] table in config.toml or they will be silently ignored.

Templates

Templates live in the templates/ directory and the files need to end by .html. Only Tera templates are supported.

Each kind of page get their own variables:

// TODO: detail the schema of the variables

• index.html: gets section representing the index section and all sections
• page.html: gets page that contains the data for that page
• section.html: gets section that contains the data for pages in it and its subsections
• tags.html: gets tags
• tag.html: gets tag and pages
• categories.html: gets categories
• category.html: gets category and pages

Additionally, all pages get a config variable representing the data in config.toml, current_url that represent the absolute URL of the current page and current_path that represents the path of the URL of the current page, starting with /. If you want to know all the data present in a template content, simply put {{ __tera_context }} in the templates and it will print it.

Static files

Everything in the static folder will be copied into the output directory as-is.

Pages

Pages have to start with a front-matter enclosed in +++. Here is a minimal example:

+++
title = "My page"
description = "Some meta info"
+++

A simple page with fixed url

A front-matter has only optional variables:

• title
• description
• date: a YYYY-MM-DD or RFC339 formatted date
• slug: what slug to use in the url
• url: this overrides the slug and make this page accessible at {config.base_url}/{url}
• tags: an array of strings
• category: only one category is allowed
• draft: whether the post is a draft or not
• template: if you want to change the template used to render that specific page
• aliases: which URL to redirect to the new: useful when you changed a page URL and don't want to 404

Even if your front-matter is empty, you will need to put the +++. You can also, like in the config, add your own variables in a [extra] table. The front-matter will be accessible in templates at the page.meta field.

By default, the URL of a page will follow the filesystem paths. For example, if you have a page at content/posts/python3.md, it will be available at {config.base_url}/posts/python3/. You can override the slug created from the filename by setting the slug variable in the front-matter.

Quite often, a page will have assets and you might want to co-locate them with the markdown file. Gutenberg supports that pattern out of the box: you can create a folder, put a file named index.md and any number of files along with it that are NOT markdown. Those assets will be copied in the same folder when building so you can just use a relative path to use them.

A summary is only defined if you put <!-- more --> in the content. If present in a page, the summary will be from the start up to that tag.

Sections

Sections represent a group of pages, for example a tutorials section of your site. Sections are only created in Gutenberg when a file named _index.md is found in the content directory.

This _index.md file needs to include a front-matter as well, but won't have content:

+++
title = "Tutorials"
+++

You can also set the template variable to change which template will be used to render that section.

Sections will also automatically pick up their subsections, allowing you to make some complex pages layout and table of contents.

You can define how a section pages are sorted using the sort_by key in the front-matter. The choices are date, order and none (default). Pages that can't be sorted will currently be silently dropped: the final page will be rendered but it will not appear in the pages variable in the section template.

A special case is the _index.md at the root of the content directory which represents the homepage. It is only there to control pagination and sorting of the homepage.

You can also paginate section, including the index by setting the paginate_by field in the front matter to an integer. This represents the number of pages for each pager of the paginator. You will need to access pages through the paginator object. (TODO: document that).

Table of contents

Each page/section will generate a table of content based on the title. It is accessible through section.toc and page.toc. It is a list of headers that contains a permalink, a title and children. Here is an example on how to make a ToC using that:

<ul>
{% for h1 in page.toc %}
    <li>
        <a href="{{h1.permalink}}">{{ h1.title }}</a>
        {% if h1.children %}
            <ul>
                {% for h2 in h1.children %}
                    <li>
                        <a href="{{h2.permalink}}">{{ h2.title }}</a>
                    </li>
                {% endfor %}
            </ul>
        {% endfor %}
    </li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>

While headers are neatly ordered in that example, you can a table of contents looking like h2, h2, h1, h3 without any issues.

Taxonomies: tags and categories

Individual tag/category pages are only supported for pages having a date.

Code highlighting themes

Code highlighting can be turned on by setting highlight_code = true in config.toml.

When turned on, all text between backticks will be highlighted, like the example below.

let site = Site::new();

If the name of the language is not given, it will default to plain-text highlighting.

Gutenberg uses Sublime Text themes for syntax highlighting. It comes with the following theme built-in:

• base16-ocean-dark
• base16-ocean-light
• gruvbox-dark
• gruvbox-light
• inspired-github
• kronuz
• material-dark
• material-light
• monokai
• solarized-dark
• solarized-light

Internal links

You can have internal links in your markdown that will be replaced with the full URL when rendering. To do so, use the normal markdown link syntax, start the link with ./ and point to the .md file you want to link to. The path to the file starts from the content directory.

For example, linking to a file located at content/pages/about.md would be [my link](./pages/about.md).

Anchors

Headers get an automatic id from their content in order to be able to add deep links. You can also choose, at the section level, whether to automatically insert an anchor link next to it. It is turned off by default but can be turned on by setting insert_anchor = "left" or insert_anchor = "right" in the _index.md file. left will insert the anchor link before the title text and right will insert it after.

The default template is very basic and will need CSS tweaks in your project to look decent. It can easily be overwritten by creating a anchor-link.html file in the templates directory.

Shortcodes

Gutenberg uses markdown for content but sometimes you want to insert some HTML, for example for a YouTube video. Rather than copy/pasting the HTML around, Gutenberg supports shortcodes, allowing you to define templates using Tera and call those templates inside markdown.

Using a shortcode

There are 2 kinds of shortcodes: simple ones and those that take some content as body. All shortcodes need to be preceded by a blank line or they will be contained in a paragraph.

Simple shortcodes are called the following way:

{{ youtube(id="my_youtube_id") }}

Shortcodes with a body are called like so:

{% quote(author="Me", link="https://google.com") %}
My quote
{% end %}

The shortcodes names are taken from the files they are defined in, for example a shortcode with the name youtube will try to render the template at templates/shortcodes/youtube.html.

Built-in shortcodes

Gutenberg comes with a few built-in shortcodes:

• YouTube: embeds a YouTube player for the given YouTube id. Also takes an optional autoplay argument that can be set to true if wanted
• Vimeo: embeds a Vimeo player for the given Vimeo id
• Streamable: embeds a Streamable player for the given Streamable id
• Gist: embeds a Github gist from the url given. Also takes an optional file argument if you only want to show one of the files

Defining a shortcode

All shortcodes need to be in the templates/shortcodes folder and their files to end with .html. Shortcodes templates are simple Tera templates, with all the args being directly accessible in the template.

In case of shortcodes with a body, the body will be passed as the body variable.

Example sites

• vincent.is: https://gitlab.com/Keats/vincent.is

• code<future

Adding syntax highlighting languages and themes

Adding a syntax

Syntax highlighting depends on submodules so ensure you load them first:

$ git submodule update --init 

Gutenberg only works with syntaxes in the .sublime-syntax format. If your syntax is in .tmLanguage format, open it in Sublime Text and convert it to sublime-syntax by clicking on Tools > Developer > New Syntax from ... and put it at the root of sublime_syntaxes.

You can also add a submodule to the repository of the wanted syntax:

$ cd sublime_syntaxes
$ git submodule add https://github.com/elm-community/Elm.tmLanguage.git

Note that you can also only copy manually the updated syntax definition file but this means Gutenberg won't be able to automatically update it.

You can check for any updates to the current packages by running:

$ git submodule update --remote --merge

And finally from the root of the repository run the following command:

$ cargo run --example generate_sublime synpack sublime_syntaxes sublime_syntaxes/newlines.packdump sublime_syntaxes/nonewlines.packdump

Adding a theme

A gallery containing lots of themes at https://tmtheme-editor.herokuapp.com/#!/editor/theme/Agola%20Dark. More themes can be easily added to gutenberg, just make a PR with the wanted theme added in the sublime_themes directory and run the following command from the repository root:

$ cargo run --example generate_sublime themepack sublime_themes sublime_themes/all.themedump

You should see the list of themes being added.