Mextron

Blazing fast static site generator written in Rust

Mextron

Art by Crayon Crates.io

A blazing fast static site generator in Rust

🚧 This project is currently under development. Expect breaking changes. 🚧 🚧 This Project is currently POSIX friendly. For windows machines please use WSL🚧

A sleek and minimalist static site generator written in Rust. Designed with simplicity in mind, Mextron makes website creation a breeze. It supports Markdown files, allowing you to write content with ease.

DEMO

Here is a live DEMO my blog is built using Mextron.

Installation

You can install Mextron using Cargo:

cargo install mextron

Create new project

You can initialise a new project using new command.

mextron new <folder>

You can optionally specify a theme also.

mextron new <folder> -t pico

Running Mextron in Dev mode

You can run mextron in the dev mode by using the dev mode There is also a -w i.e watch feature flag in dev mode for using hot reloading.

mextron dev -w # If you are in the Project Directory 
# OR
mextron dev <INPUT_DIRECTORY> -w # If you wanna specify which folder to run

Running Mextron in Build mode

You can run mextron in the build mode by using the build mode

mextron build # If you are in the Project Directory 
# OR
mextron build <INPUT_DIRECTORY> # If you wanna specify which folder to run

Features

Markdown support
Custom Themes
Syntax highlighting
SEO
Custom Metadata Passthrough

Project Structure

The following folder structure is expected by Mextron:

.
├── pages
│  ├── about
│  │  └── page.md
│  ├── blog
│  │  ├── page.md
│  │  └── why-learn-rust.md
│  └── page.md
├── public
│  ├── favicon.ico
│  ├── flamethrower.js
│  └── images
│     └── og.png
├── Settings.toml
└── theme
   ├── app.hbs
   ├── blog.hbs
   ├── global.css
   └── post.hbs

The docs folder is the input directory of the project and is always specified while running dev server or building. You can specify a different input directory like this:

mextron dev <input-dir-path>

The Settings.toml file contains the settings of the website, you can customize the website by changing the values in this file.
The public folder contains all the static assets of the website, these files are copied as-is to the output directory.
The pages folder contains all the Markdown files, this is where you write your content.
The theme folder contains all site templates and styles. It is written using handlebars syntax.
The global.css file contains the global CSS of the website, you can write your own CSS in this file.

Building custom pages

A great example would be a blog index page where you show a list of posts and link to them. This can be achieved by accessing the site directory that is passed to every page. The site directory can be accessed through the root object, this is available in every page and it represents the entire site structure including its metadata, so I can render a blog index page like this:

A custom template say blog, with lists all pages under blog folder.

<ul>
	{{#each root.blog}}
		{{#if (not (eq @key "_self"))}}
			<hgroup>
				<h4><a href="{{@key}}/">{{this.title}}</a></h4>
				<h2>{{this.author}}</h2>
			</hgroup>
		{{/if}}
	{{/each}}
</ul>

Then define a new page under blog folder and specify the template as blog which we have created as shown above.

--
template: blog
title: ~/Mextron/blog
--

### This is a blog index

The Settings file

The Settings.toml file contains the settings of the website, you can customize the website by changing the values in this file.

[dev]
port = 3000 # The port on which the dev server runs
ws_port = 3001 # The port on which the dev server websocket runs, for hot reloading

[site]
script_urls = [] # List of script urls to be included in the site
style_urls = [ # List of style urls to be included in the site
  'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@picocss/pico@1/css/pico.min.css',
  'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/prismjs@1.29.0/themes/prism-tomorrow.min.css',
]

[meta]
title = "~/Mextron" # The title of the website
description = "Blazing fast static site generator written in Rust" # The description of the website
og_image_url = "https://mextron.vercel.app/images/og.png" # The og image url of the website
base_url = "https://mextron.vercel.app" # The base url of the website, used for building sitemap

[navigation] # The navigation links of the website
links = [
  { label = "~/", url = "/" },
  { label = "GitHub", url = "https://github.com/AvaterClasher/mextron" },
  { label = "Website", url = "https://soumyadipmoni.netlify.app" },
  { label = "Blog", url = "/blog/" },
  { label = "About", url = "/about/" },
]

[data] # The data to be passed to every page, can be accessed using `data` object
author = "Soumyadip Moni"
author_link = "https://github.com/AvaterClasher"

[remote_data] # The remote data to be fetched and passed to every page, can be accessed using `remote_data` object
repo_meta = "https://api.github.com/repos/AvaterClasher/mextron" # The url of the remote data

Handlebars Helpers

Mextron provides a few handlebars helpers to make your life easier. This project uses handlebars-rust and hence all the helpers provided by it are available. Apart from that, Mextron provides the following helpers:

slice: Slices an array and returns the sliced array.
sort-by: Sorts an array of objects by a key.
format-date: Formats a date using the given format.
stringify: Converts a value to string, this is useful for debugging.

You can find examples of these helpers in the demo project.

Deployment

You can build the site using the build command:

mextron build <input-dir-path>

The build outputs are saved to _site folder. So, you can deploy the website by copying the _site folder to your web server. You can also use GitHub pages to host your website. Here is an example GitHub action to deploy your website to GitHub pages:

# Simple workflow for deploying static content to GitHub Pages
name: Publish to Pages

on:
    # Runs on pushes targeting the default branch
    push:
        branches: ["main"]

    # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
    workflow_dispatch:

# Sets permissions of the GITHUB_TOKEN to allow deployment to GitHub Pages
permissions:
    contents: read
    pages: write
    id-token: write

# Allow only one concurrent deployment, skipping runs queued between the run in-progress and latest queued.
# However, do NOT cancel in-progress runs as we want to allow these production deployments to complete.
concurrency:
    group: "pages"
    cancel-in-progress: false

jobs:
    # Single deploy job since we're just deploying
    deploy:
        environment:
            name: github-pages
            url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.page_url }}
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            - name: Checkout
              uses: actions/checkout@v3
            - name: Setup Pages
              uses: actions/configure-pages@v3
            - name: Install
              run: cargo install mextron
            - name: Build
              run: mextron build src # Replace src with your input directory
            - name: Upload artifact
              uses: actions/upload-pages-artifact@v1
              with:
                  # Upload entire repository
                  path: "./_site"
            - name: Deploy to GitHub Pages
              id: deployment
              uses: actions/deploy-pages@v2

LICENSE

You can find the license here.