# The shrimple static site generator
## Installation
```console
cargo install shrimple
```
## Features
### 1. Keep it shrimple
No external configuration needed: you have HTML, you have `shrimple`, you call it, and get a site ready to be deployed.
```console
shrimple
```
This will build the website with `index.html` as its root and paste the root and all the files it references into `dist`
### 2. Compute anything anywhere with Lua
`shrimple` has Lua evaluation built-in and it can be utilised in any part of any file: in text nodes, in attributes, inside strings, you name it!
Use `$VAR` to access a Lua variable, and `$(code)` or `<$lua>code` to evaluate arbitrary Lua code and paste its return value
```html
<$lua>
SHRIMP = "shrimp.png"
SHRIMP_SIZE = 100
```
### 3. Don't list assets, just use them
No need to deliberately specify `index.css`, `image.png`, etc. as an asset: if you mention it in HTML, it'll be registered automatically.
In the example above, the file `shrimp.png` is mentioned in `image` element's `href` attribuet, so it will automatically be searched
in the same directory where `index.html` is, and will be copied to the output directory.
If the asset is somewhere out there on the vast plains of the Internet, and you wish to make sure it's always available to your users,
you can cache it! just prefix the attribute containing the link with `$cached`, and you're all set.
### 4. Iterate quickly
The CLI comes with a very handy flag: call `shrimple -w` or `shrimple --watch` to spin up a lightweight local server
that'll recompile your website as needed and show it to you right in the browser.
### 5. Utilise saner HTML
The subset of HTML accepted by `shrimple` is intended to smoothe out irregularities & verbosity of
the standard HTML. The changes that make it shrimple are:
- No syntactical difference between normal and [void](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Void_element) elements:
all elements can be self-closing, and most can also end in a closing tag.
- No need for top-level ``: it's inserted automatically into the compiled HTML.
- The encoding of the document is automatically set to UTF-8.
This snippet of standard HTML:
```html
Hello World
Hello World
```
is equivalent to this snippet of shrimple HTML:
```html
Hello World
Hello World
```