Description:
StrangeCase 4.6.8
It’s yet another static site generator. Have you seen jekyll?
hyde? Yup. Like those.
But this one is:
Written in python, unlike jekyll
NOT complicated, unlike hyde. And I mean really NOT complicated.
I just read about nanoc, and realized that it is the Ruby equivalent to
StrangeCase. I commend them! I had considered porting StrangeCase to Ruby
(and maybe I will some day, just for kicks), but for now, I would say to
Rubyists: use nanoc.
INSTALLATION
$ pip install StrangeCase
$ scase # generates the site
$ scase --watch # generates the site and watches
# for changes to source files
HELP!
Already!? Geez:
#strangecase @ irc.freenode.net
(i'm colinta)
QUICK START
In your project folder, make a site/ and public/ folder.
Put index.j2 in site/, and put some html in there.
Add YAML front matter to that file. It looks like this:
---
title: My first StrangeCase site
---
<!doctype html>
...
Use that YAML in your page using Jinja2’s template language syntax:
---
title: My first StrangeCase site
---
<!doctype html>
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
Run strange case:
$ scase
Open public/index.html. You might want to hold onto your jaw, lest it
drop to the floor. Yeah, it’s not gonna say {{ title }}, it’s gonna say
My First Page in big letters.
SLOWER START
Whoopity freakin’ do, right? Let’s add a layout and create a site.
At this point this demo site looks like this:
project
├── public
│ └── index.html
└── site
└── index.j2
Add a layouts folder, and put a layout in there:
project
├── layouts
│ └── base.j2
├── public
│ └── index.html
└── site
└── index.j2
layouts/base.j2 looks like this:
<!doctype html>
<head>
<title>{{ title or "Nifty Wow!" }}</title>
</head>
<body>
{% block content %}
{% endblock %}
</body>
And update index.j2 to use this layout:
---
title: My first StrangeCase site
---
{% extends "layouts/base.j2" %}
{% block content %}
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
{% endblock %}
You can run StrangeCase again. public/index.html will now have <head>
and <body> tags surrounding it.
If you’re lost at this point, you should read up on Jinja. We haven’t really
done anything more than run index.j2 through jinja and wrote the output to
index.html.
Now let’s add a projects folder and a couple projects. When you add content
to your site, put it in the site/ folder. Most simple projects will pretty
much only use the site/ folder and a layouts/ folder wth one or two
layouts in there.
I’m going to throw a curveball into the project file names. StrangeCase orders
files by sorting them by file name. This is important when you go to display
images or blogs in order by date. If you want to have them ordered by anything
other than filename, you can use a couple different naming schemes at the
beginning of the file name. jekyll does a similar thing, btw.
I’m going to add two prefixes so we can see what happens when we process
files this way.
project
├── layouts
│ └── base.j2
├── public
│ └── ...
└── site
├── index.j2
└── projects
├── 001_2012_02_27_first_project.j2 #
├── 002_2012_02_28_second_project.j2 # look over here!
└── 003_2012_02_27_third_project.j2 #
And here is what each project template looks like:
{% extends "layouts/base.j2" %}
{% block content %}
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
<p>Project number #{{ order }} started on {{ created_at | date }}</p>
{% endblock %}
A little shorter than our original index.j2. Notice I’ve left out the YAML
front matter, and yet I am using the variables title, order, and
created_at. Where do they get their value from?
The file name, and configurators.
001_2012_02_27_first_project
\+/ \---+----/ \-----+-----/
| | |
| | +-title
| |
| +-created_at
|
+-order
In this way, you get some variables for free just by naming your files with a
date and/or order prefix. We are looking at the by-product of “configurators”.
They are passed the source file name and the config dictionary. There are some
that have to run, and some that are optional but enabled by default.
Anyway, if you tried to run StrangeCase right now, you would get the following
error:
$ scase
...
jinja2.exceptions.TemplateAssertionError: no filter named 'date'
No worries, there is a date filter built into StrangeCase. It’s just not
enabled. So add a config.yaml file to the project root:
project
├── config.yaml
├── layouts
│ └── base.j2
├── public
│ └── ...
└── site
├── index.j2
└── projects
├── 001_2012_02_27_first_project.j2
├── 002_2012_02_28_second_project.j2
└── 003_2012_02_27_third_project.j2
and add the date filter:
filters:
date: strange_case.extensions.date.date
Now you can run StrangeCase with no errors, which will generate:
<!doctype html>
<head>
<title>Nifty Wow!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1></h1>
<p>Project number #1 started on 27 Feb 2012</p>
</body>
Moving along. Now let’s create a project listing at projects/index.j2. We
need a way to “fetch” the project pages. This is going to be very easy,
because really all that StrangeCase does is build a resource tree. And we
can walk that tree using the node names. So if we just iterate over the
projects/ folder, we’ll have our project nodes.
Add index.j2 to site/projects/
project
├── config.yaml
├── layouts
│ └── base.j2
├── public
│ └── ...
└── site
├── index.j2
└── projects
├── index.j2 # <===
├── 001_2012_02_27_first_project.j2
├── 002_2012_02_28_second_project.j2
└── 003_2012_02_27_third_project.j2
index.j2:
{% extends "layouts/base.j2" %}
{% block content %}
{% for project in site.projects %}
<p><a href="{{ project.url }}">{{ project.title }}</a></p>
{% endfor %}
{% endblock %}
Iterating over folders is a very easy thing to do in StrangeCase. It’s how you
do things like create an index page, as we saw here, or create a photo blog
(for photo in site.images.my_fun_trip). It is the thing that I wanted to be
really easy, because I couldn’t figure out, at a glance, how to do it in
jekyll or hyde (it is possible in hyde, I think).
Notice that when we iterate over the site.projects folder, it doesn’t
include the index.html file. Makes sense, though, right? The index page
is considered to be the same “page” as the folder. Even though they are
seperate nodes, they have the same URL.
To wrap things up, let’s make a link to the project page from the home page.
Every node has a url property, and you can access pages by their name.
“name” is whatever is “leftover” after the created_at date, order and extension
have been pulled out. I’ll add a link to the second project to demonstrate
this:
---
title: My first StrangeCase site
---
{% extends "layouts/base.j2" %}
{% block content %}
<h1>{{ title }}</h1>
<p><a href="{{ site.projects.url }}">Projects</a></p>
<p>My favorite project: <a href="{{ site.projects.second_project.url }}">My second project</a></p>
{% endblock %}
This wraps up the tutorial! Now, I’ll explain the inner workings.
TIPS AND TRICKS
Here are some quick little neat things.
You’ll need a good, solid config.yaml. Just copy and paste this when you
start a new site:
extensions:
- strange_case.extensions.misaka.MarkdownExtension
filters:
date: strange_case.extensions.date.date
markdown: strange_case.extensions.misaka.markdown
json: json.dumps
sha: strange_case.extensions.hashlib.sha
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.image
- strange_case.extensions.category
- strange_case.extensions.paginated
- strange_case.extensions.scss
Iterate over a folder of pages, or a folder of assets, using
{% for page in site.folder.subfolder %}. There is no “easy” way to
iterate over a folder that contains folders - what you really want there is
to get the index file of the folder, it will contain the meta data (title,
created_at, etc) that you probably want to display in the listing. I will
try and fix this, but probably won’t until someone asks for it.
Do not mix pages and assets. You can do it, but things get goofy when you
try and iterate over the folder. If you {% for page in site.folder %},
you will end up with both types of file. If you really want to mix them,
you can iterate over just the pages (and exclude index.html files) using
iter_pages, introduced in v4.3.0.
You can assign “pointers” in your YAML front matter. They look like this:
page ->: site.other.page
If your asset folders are getting unwieldy
(site.static.images.posts.pics_of.kittens), use this trick to shorten it
down in your template. In this case you must prefix the pointer with
my., because jinja will not know how to lookup “page ->” when you say
only “page”, and I have not devised a workaround yet:
---
pics ->: site.static.images.posts.pics_of.kittens
---
{% for pic in my.pics %}
<img src="{{ pic.url }}">
{% endfor %}
Page content is simply not available during template generation. For that, I
can’t help you. That would introduce page dependencies, which would suck.
If you want a “blurb” or “summary” of a page’s content, you’ll just have to
add it to the page front matter:
---
title: my post
summary: |
I think this post is great. It's all about code:
print "like this"
---
Back in your listing, you can run that summary through markdown using a
filter:
{% for post in site.posts %}
<h3>{{ post.title }}</h3>
{% if post.summary -%}
<div class="summary">
Summary:<br />
{{ post.summary|markdown }}
</div>
{% endif %}
As of v4.5.0, you do not have to have a CONFIG dict in your config.py
file. Instead, you can create or import functions into that file, and then
reference them from your project’s config.yaml. For instance, to add a
pluralize filter to your project:
# config.py
import inflect ; inflect = inflect.engine()
pluralize = inflect.plural
# config.yaml
filters:
pluralize: config.pluralize
Interestingly, this was a complete accident. But I’ve added a test for it,
so it’s here to stay! :-)
Sometimes you will want to override values, but dont_inherit gets in the
way. In those instances, you can add values to override, usually in a
folder config.yaml. One common case is to set a folder of images’
title to "". The default configurators would set the title based
on the name of the file (title_from_name configurator), but it will not
if the title is set to anything, even "".
??? I’ll add to this list as needed.
STRANGECASE OVERVIEW
StrangeCase parses all the files and directories in site/ and builds a tree
of nodes. At its big, squishy heart, that’s what StrangeCase does. Then it
runs generate on every node.
Files/Folders that match ignore are not processed at all.
Folders become FolderNode objects (site/, though, is a RootNode)
and scanned recursively.
Pages (html and jinja files) become JinjaNode(FileNode) objects.
Assets (javascript, css, images) become AssetNode(FileNode) objects.
These can be overridden using the type config.
Additional nodes can be created by including the appropriate processor and
setting the node’s type to use that processor. These are things like
pagination, tags, images, and categories.
The nodes are placed in a tree:
(root, aka site) # RootNode
| static/ # FolderNode
| | css/ # FolderNode
| | + style.css # AssetNode
| \ image/ # FolderNode
| | img1.png # AssetNode (or possibly ImageNode)
| | img2.png # AssetNode
| + img3.png # AssetNode
| robots.txt # PageNode
| index (index.j2 => index.html) # PageNode
\ blogs/ # FolderNode
| test1 (test1.j2 => test1.html) # PageNode
+ test2 (test2.j2 => test2.html) # PageNode
SOO? WHA’ HAPPENED?
1 - Build stage
In the build stage, StrangeCase is looking at the files and folders in site/.
First a root node is created:
root_node = build_node(config, site_path, deploy_path, '')[0]
The build_node method configures and processes the node.
configures means that it passes the source_path and config to each
of the configurators (we saw these working in the tutorial above:
created_at_from_name, order_from_name, and title_from_name in
particular). processes means that one or more nodes are instantiated and
added to the node tree. The root_node sits at the top, and in your
templates you access it using {{ site }}.
This process continues recursively for every file and folder in site (except
ignore-d files).
1.a - Configuration
When you run StrangeCase, it starts building a config object, a dictionary
(actually an instance of ConfigDict, which extends dict). This object
(and clones of it) will be used throughout the generation of your site, so it is
important to understand what it does, and how you control it.
First, strange_case_config.py establishes the initial defaults. Look at
that file, or read about the defaults below. Next, the project config file is
merged in. This is the config.yaml file that sits at the top of your
project. Then command-line arguments are processed. Finally, if a function
is assigned to config_hook, it will be passed the configuration, and it is
expected to throw errors or make changes to that object as needed. This is how
“scaffolding” is accomplished, which is actually just a StrangeCase extension
and a few handy site/ folders.
When a new node is being built, it is given a copy of the config dictionary and
passed through the configurators. These add properties to the config dict that
are specific to the node that is going to be built, including specifying what
type of node will be built. The default list of configurators is in
strange_case_config.py.
Nodes inherit all the configuration of the parent node except for the keys that
are in dont_inherit (name, target_name, type, and most of the
properties that are assigned by configurators).
If the node is a folder, the special file config.yaml will be merged into that
node if it exists. If it is a file node, the parent folder’s config is checked
for a files entry, and if the current file is in there, that config is
merged in.
page types can have YAML front matter, which we’ve read all about already.
See the section below that outlines the default config, and how those options
affect processing. Know this: everything is controlled using config. If you’re
trying to do something complicated and having trouble, please create an issue.
I’d like to compile a list of HOWTOs/FAQs.
1.b - Processors
During the build stage, page, folder, and asset nodes are created using
processors. There are four built-in processors, and more available as
extensions. One important thing to note here is that assets and pages are
differentiated only by the fact that one of them is passed through Jinja2. If
you want to process a JavaScript file through Jinja2, you should associate
*.js with the page type, or set type: page in the parent folder
config.yaml file (using the files: dictionary):
file_types:
- [page, '*.js']
# or, if you want to only process a couple files:
- [page, ['special.js', 'special-2.js']]
# or assign the 'page' processor
files:
special.js: { type: page }
type is not inherited, but file_types is, so you can set a whole folder
of assets to become page nodes using this config.
Processors are kind of tricky to build, because they need to have a firm
understanding of the build process. If you’re feeling industrious, there are
plenty of existing extensions (category and pagination) that can push you in the
right direction.
2 - Populating
If you are using the category processor this stage is important. If you’re not,
it won’t matter so much.
Some nodes can’t know what content they will generate until the entire site is
scanned. Like categories! We need to know all the pages in the site before
we know what all the categories are, and how many pages have that category.
These nodes are stored as Processor``s, and they are nodes that say "hold on, I'm not ready yet...". They must implement a ``populate method, which
when called removes the processor node from the tree and replaces itself with
nodes (or it can insert nodes elsewhere in the tree, or do nothing I suppose).
If you are writing your own processor, and need to access a node’s config, you
might want to use the item-index operators, []. If the configuration is not
set, you’ll get None instead of an AttributeError.
node.thingy # => AttributeError
node['thingy'] # => None
After the tree is populated, the site is ready to generate. You will have a
tree of nodes, with the root node at the top, and it is always named "site".
3 - Generating
The generate method is called on the root node, and recursively on all the
children. This is where folders are created, pages are generated, and assets
are copied over. If you are using the image processor, you might also have
thumbnails created using Pillow.
TEMPLATES
In your templates, you have access to anything in the inherited config and in
per-page metadata:
/config.yaml:
meta:
author:
name: "Colin"
/site/index.j2:
---
title: test
---
<h1>{{ meta.author.name }}</h1>
<h2>{{ title }}</h2>
<h2>{{ my.title }}</h2>
Generates:
<h1>Colin</h1>
<h2>test</h2>
<h2>test</h2>
Node properties
Nodes have a number of useful properties, roughly grouped into:
config/metadata like name, title, created_at. This is the big one.
website-specific - url, index, is_{page,asset,folder}
traversal - parents, children, siblings, iterable
Config
Hopefully by now the importance of the config object has been bored into your
head. StrangeCase is all about the config object. That, and the node tree.
And that’s it. Nothing else. Oh, and templating. Templating, config, and the
node tree. That’s all it needs. That’s it, that’s… and this lamp. That’s
all.
In your templates, the configuration is simply “there”. The properties of the
current node and all the configuration it has inherited is given to jinja2 as
the context. There is, however, one exception to this, which are “pointer”
configurations:
---
images ->: site.static.images
---
{{ images|length }} # wrong
{{ my.images|length }} # right
I have not bothered to fix this, since I prefer the second syntax. I use the
my prefix anytime I’m referring to the YAML front matter - kind of keeps
things sane for me. If people clamor for the pointer thing to get fixed it
wouldn’t be too difficult.
Website
The most used is, of course, node.url. URLs are created by appending the
current node’s URL to the parent URL. The URL of the site node is assigned
by the set_url configurator, and defaults to /. If you want your static
site to be in a subfolder, assign something else to the root_url config.
There are other configs used internally, like is_page and index. These
are worth looking at. is_page returns True when the node was processed
using Jinja - it does not mean that the page is an HTML page, so robots.txt
and sitemap.xml will be included in there, too. BUT hey! You can fix that!
Add:
---
is_page: false
---
And that node will be excluded, it will considered to be an asset instead. An
asset is any file that is not a page. If you want to set is_asset: true
above, that is supported, and an infinite loop is avoided, but the “official”
stance is that is_asset := ! is_page.
Accessing any node by name
This is a common thing to do in StrangeCase. The name, if it is not
explicitly declared, is detemined by the file name. The default configurators
will remove ordering (order_from_name) and created_at
(created_at_from_name) from the front of the file name, and then the default
name (setdefault_name) will be the file name with non-alphanumerics replaced
with underscores, lowercased, and the html extension is removed. All other
extensions will remain. Examples:
This is a file name - DUH.j2 becomes this_is_a_file_name___duh
WHAT, a great image?.jpg becomes what__a_great_image_jpg
Example of accessing the “Best blog ever” page’s URL:
<a href="{{ site.blogs.best_blog_ever.url }}">Best blog ever</a>.
All nodes except the root node (site is the root node, if you haven’t
noticed) have siblings nodes, a next node, and a prev node. If this
is the first / last node, prev / next returns None. siblings always
returns a list, and at the minimum the current node will be in there (even the
root node, but why you would call site.siblings is beyond me).
There is also an ancestors property, which returns all the parent pages of
the node. BUT, in order to be the most useful, this method looks for a node
called index on the parents, so instead of getting a list of folder nodes,
you will get list of index pages. If you’re building a breadcrumb trail,
ancestors is your friend, and you’ll be glad that the index pages are
returned instead of folder nodes.
Iterating over folders
We’ve already seen this, but I’ll include it again for completeness:
{% for blog in site.blogs %}
<p>{{ loop.index }}. {{ blog.title }}</p>
{% endfor %}
=>
<p>1. Blog Title</p>
<p>2. Blog Title</p>
Note: Files named index.html will not be included in this list. This is
a very reasonable design decision, but I can imagine a situation where you have
a file (think robots.txt) that also doesn’t belong in the iterable pages
list. So iterable: false is available as a config setting.
Iterate over a folder of images
{% for image in site.static.image %}
<img src="{{ image.url }}" />
{% endfor %}
BAM, how’s that for an image listing! This might be my favorite thing in
StrangeCase: that folders are iterable. It makes things that were weird in
jekyll (site.categories.blablabla) very easy, and intuitive, I think, since
you only have to know the folder name of your images/blogs/projects/whatever.
You might want to check out the image processor, explained below. It uses
Pillow to make thumbnail images.
You can check what kind of node you’re working with using the type property
(“page”, “folder”, “asset”) or the is_page, is_folder, is_asset
methods. Internally is_page is used a lot, and if you mix your page and
asset files in the same folders, these are useful for filtering those out in a
for loop.
Lastly, the .all() method, and its more specific variants, are very useful
if you need to make a sitemap, or to grab the entire node tree at some point.
The all() method definition says it all I think:
def all(self, recursive=False, folders=None, pages=None, assets=None, processors=None):
"""
Returns descendants, ignoring iterability. Folders, assets, and
pages can all be included or excluded as the case demands.
If you specify any of folders, pages, assets or processors, only those objects
will be returned.
Otherwise all node types will be returned.
recursive, though, defaults to False. calling all(True) is the same as all(recursive=True)
"""
The variants are all subsets of all():
def pages(self, recursive=False):
return self.all(recursive=recursive, pages=True)
def folders(self, recursive=False):
return self.all(recursive=recursive, folders=True)
def assets(self, recursive=False):
return self.all(recursive=recursive, assets=True)
def files(self, recursive=False):
return self.all(recursive=recursive, pages=True, assets=True)
def processors(self, recursive=False):
return self.all(recursive=recursive, processors=True)
OK, SO
Mostly random thoughts here. Most of what you might want to know about StrangeCase should be here, so expect some repetition.
In your project folder (where you execute StrangeCase), you can have
config.yaml and/or config.py, and you definitely have a site/
folder, where your site content is stored. There are probably Jinja2 layouts,
includes, and who knows what else in the root folder, too.
site/ stores site content: templates, assets, folders, and maybe some
“special” files like category pages. These are processed, rendered, copied, or
ignored, as the case may be (dot-files are ignored, btw!).
When StrangeCase is done it places your static site in public/.
There are only two special folders: site and public. They can be changed in
config (site_path and dest_path).
config.yaml stores context variables. It is merged with the default
config. Child folders and pages inherit all the config settings of their
parent except the variables in dont_inherit:
type
name
target_name
title
created_at
order
Template files (.html, .txt, .md) can contain YAML front matter. If the first
line is a bunch of dashes (^[-]{3,}$), all lines up to the matching dashes
will be treated as YAML and added to that files context variables.
Binary files can have front matter, too, but since you can’t place it in the
file, it is stored in a special files: setting in the parent folder’s
config.yaml file. It should be a dictionary with the key corresponding to the
name of the file, and the value is the front matter for that file. files:
entries in config.yaml are not inherited.
Everything in config.yaml and YAML front matter is available as a context
variable in your templates.
Templates are rendered using Jinja2.
StrangeCase points Jinja to your project folder, so you can use any
directories you want in there to store layouts, macros, and partials.
layouts that are in layouts/ are extended using {% extends 'layouts/file.j2' %}
includes in anywhere/ are included using {% include 'anywhere/file.j2' %}
I suppose the convention is to have layouts/ and includes/ folders.
In the project root, config.py is where you can place runtime things,
like…
if you need to calculate a value (e.g. datetime.time)
fetch some data from a database (ewww!)
import jinja extensions (or use ‘extensions’ in config.yaml)
import jinja filters (or use ‘filters’ in config.yaml)
register StrangeCase processors (or use ‘processors’ in config.yaml)
If you need a page to be processed differently, set type to the desired
file type in the config for that file/folder. For instance, the category index
page should be type: categories.
You can prefix variables on a page with my. (e.g. my.title or
my.parent). I think it looks better in some places because it makes it
clear where the content comes from (e.g. {{ my.title }} as opposed to just
{{ title }}). Totally optional.
Based on the file name, config.yaml, and YAML front matter, some config
settings get changed during the build stage. See configurators.py for
these methods. See strange_case_config.py for the order.
DEFAULT CONFIG
You should study this to learn a lot about how StrangeCase works. The reason I
boast that StrangeCase is simple is because everything it does can be
controlled using the config.
If you go looking in strange_case_config for these settings, you won’t find
them. They have been broken up into configurators. In the early life of
StrangeCase, all configuration was done in one file. Now they are broken up
into a list of configurator functions, and each function can add defaults. More
complicated, but more extensible.
config_file: 'config.yaml' # name of file that contains config
ignore: ['config.yaml', '.*'] # which files to ignore altogether while building the site
dont_inherit: # nodes will not inherit these properties
- type
- name
- target_name
- title
- created_at
- order
- iterable
- is_index
- url
- skip
file_types: # how files should be processed. some processors add to this list, like to associate images
- [page, ['*.j2', '*.jinja2', '*.jinja', '*.html', '*.txt', '*.xml']], # with the image processor
default_type: asset # if this is falsey, unassociated nodes will be ignored.
default_root_type: root # you probably shouldn't change this!
default_folder_type: folter # you probably shouldn't change this!
rename_extensions: # which extensions to rename, and to what
'.j2': '.html',
'.jinja2': '.html'
'.jinja': '.html',
'.md': '.html',
index.html: index.html # determines which file is the index file, which in turn determines "iterability" (index pages are not iterable)
html_extension: '.html' # files with this extension are html files (`page.is_page` => `True`)
# PROTECTED
# these can only be assigned in the root config file, otherwise they will
# be treated as plain ol' file data
site_path: 'site/' # where to find site content
deploy_path: 'public/' # where to put the generated site
remove_stale_files: true # removes files that were not generated.
dont_remove: ['.*'] # list of glob patterns to ignore when removing stale files
extensions: [] # list of Jinja2 extension classes as a dot-separated import path
filters: {} # dictionary of `filter_name: filter.method`.
processors: [] # additional processors. Processors register themselves as a certain type.
configurators: [ # list of configurators. The built-ins do very important things, so overriding this does *bad things*
meta_before, # assigns defaults from the configurators ``.defaults`` property
file_types, # checks 'file_types' for a pattern that matches the file name
page_types, # if you want to use your own template engine, you'll need to add it to this list
merge_files_config, # merges files[filename] with filename
folder_config_file, # processes folder/config.yaml. If the folder config contains `ignore: true`, the folder is skipped
front_matter_config, # processes YAML front matter. Again, the file can be ignored using `ignore: true`
setdefault_name, # if 'name' isn't assigned explicitly, this assigns it based on the file name and extension
setdefault_target_name, # similarly for target_name
is_index, # compares the file name with the 'index.html' config. if they are the same, it is an index page.
setdefault_iterable, # index files are not iterable
ignore, # ignores files based on the 'ignore' setting
created_at_from_name, # Gets the date from the file name, and strips it from name.
order_from_name, # Gets the order from the file name, and strips it from name.
title_from_name, # Assigns the "title" property based on the name.
set_url, # Assigns the "local" part of the URL. The entire URL is a property of the node object
]
COMMAND LINE OPTIONS
You can override configuration - or add to it - via the command-line.
Here are all the command line arguments:
-p, –project: project_path
-s, –site: site_path
-d, –deploy: deploy_path
-r, –remove: remove_stale_files = true (default, but this can override -n)
-n, –no-remove: remove_stale_files = false
-c, –config: config_file
(and of course)
-w, –watch: watch files for changes
You can set/add arbitrary configuration using any number of key:value
arguments:
key:value any key/value pair
I use this to implement a simple code generator for my Sublime Text 2 plugins.
I run:
scase --deploy ../NewProject project:new_project desc:'A great new package'
See My PackageTemplate
for an example of how this can be used.
AND THAT’S (pretty much) IT
Jinja2 makes it easy to put pretty complicated logic in templates, which is
really the only place for them in this static generator context…
...or is it !? I’m wondering what kind of spaghetti nonsense these templates
could end up with (it’s like PHP all over again!), and how that could be fixed.
Which leads right into…
REALLY COMPLICATED STUFF
This relates to the config.py and config.yaml files mentioned above.
Take a glance at the colinta.com repository. It does most things that can be
done.
You can define extensions, filters, “configurators”, and processors.
filters is a dictionary of filter_name: package.path.
extensions is a list of package.paths.
If you specify these in config.py, you can import the extension/filter and
assign it to the list. Otherwise, in config.yaml, use a dot-separated path,
similar to how you would write an import statement, but include the class
name.
There are a couple built-in processors that are not imported & registered by
default: categories and image.
In config.py, you can add context variables that need the POWER OF PYTHON.
Things like time.time(), datetime.datetime.now().
Example of all this nonsense using config.py:
# import the processors you want to use. you don't have to do anything with them,
# it is enough just to import them.
from strange_case.extensions import image, categories
# import the extensions and filters. we still need to add these to CONFIG
from strange_case.extensions.markdown import MarkdownExtension, markdown
from time import time
CONFIG.update({
'extensions': [MarkdownExtension],
'filters': {
'markdown': markdown,
},
'time': int(time()),
})
Equivalent in the root config.yaml:
extensions:
- strange_case.extensions.misaka.MarkdownExtension
filters:
markdown: strange_case.extensions.markdown
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.image
- strange_case.extensions.categories
# cannot assign time to datetime.time. DANG.
extensions/category.py has an explanation of how processors work, and how it
was written. I made it up as I went along, and ended up adding a Processor
class that extends Node, and a concept of “populating” the tree after the
initial build. Read more in that file. I think it’s a good system, but I’m
open to friendly suggestions.
Last but not least: configurators. These are really the work horses of
StrangeCase. They look at YAML front matter, ignore files, set default
processors, and so on. If you need to do the equivalent of a context processor
in django, this is where you would do that.
Every configurator in config['configurators'] is given the node config. If
it returns nothing, the node is ignored. Otherwise, you can modify the config,
or create a whole new one, and return it.
See created_at_from_name for a good example of modifying the config based on
the file name.
JINJA FILTERS
StrangeCase includes several Jinja filters that you can use in your templates.
Remember that in order to use a filter you must first enable it in your
configuration. For example to enable the date filter you must add:
filters:
date: strange_case.extensions.date.date
This will register a filter named date which is implemented by the function
date in the module strange_case.extensions.date.
strange_case.extensions.date.date
This filter formats a date. The input can be any string readble by the
dateutil parse() method, or the string "now" for the current date. If
no format is specified it is printed as ‘01 Jan 2000’.
<p>The date is {{ 'now'|date }}.</p>
<p>The date is 06 May 2012.</p>
strange_case.extensions.inflect.pluralize
Pluralizes a variable:
<p>Category - {{ title|pluralize }}
filters:
pluralize: strange_case.extensions.inflect.pluralize
strange_case.extensions.uuid.uuid
This filter generates a UUID based on the provided input. The UUID is
generated by taking a SHA1 hash of the input combined with a namespace
identifier. The available namespaces are:
dns for fully-qualified domain names as input
url for URLs (default)
oid for ISO OID input
X500 for X.500 DNs in either DER or text format
<id>{{ 'http://myhost.com/articles'|uuid('url') }}</id>
strange_case.extensions.uuid.urn
This filter generates a UUID URN based on the provided input. This is often
useful when needing to generate unique identifies that must be URIs, for
example when generating an Atom feed.
The UUID is generated by taking a SHA1 hash of the input combined with a
namespace identifier. The available namespaces are:
dns for fully-qualified domain names as input
url for URLs (default)
oid for ISO OID input
X500 for X.500 DNs in either DER or text format
<id>{{ 'http://myhost.com/articles'|uuid('url') }}</id>
IMAGE PROCESSOR
The image processor uses Pillow to create thumbnails. The usual way to do this is
to specify the thumbnail size in a parent folder config, and then set type:
image on all the image files. This is done in the image folder’s config.yaml
file:
thumbnails:
thumb: '480x480'
file_types:
- [image, '*.jpg']
files:
img_0001.jpg:
alt: a great picture
img_0002.jpg:
...
It registers all images to be processed by the image processor, so you don’t
have to write an entry for every file in the folder.
And of course, enable the image processor in your config.yaml:
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.image
CATEGORY PROCESSOR
This processor scans your site pages, looking for pages that have a “category”
property in their config. For every category, it builds a category_detail
page that can list the pages, and a category_index page to list the
categories.
Enable the category processor in your config.yaml:
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.category
And build categories.j2 and category_detail.j2. The category_detail
page can be named anything (it will get renamed based on the category), but the
categories page will keep its name/title/etc, so give it a sensible name.
In categories.j2 you can use the categories property to iterate over the
category_detail pages:
---
type: category_index
---
{% extends 'layouts/base.j2' %}
{% for category in my.categories %}
<li><a href="{{ category.url }}">{{ category.title }}</a> (<span>{{ category.count }}</span>)</li>
{% endfor %}
In category_detail.j2 you’ll have a pages property:
---
type: category_detail
---
{% extends 'layouts/header.j2' %}
{% block content %}
<ul class="posts">
{%- for page in my.pages %}
<li><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
{%- endfor %}
</ul>
{% endblock %}
PAGINATED PROCESSOR
This processor can break up a large folder of pages. It is designed so that
converting from an index.j2 file to a paginated file is easy. Let’s say your
existing blogs/index.j2 lookes like this:
{% extends 'layouts/base.j2' %}
{% block content %}
<ul>
{% for page in site.blogs %}
<li><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endblock content %}
We’ll change this to use pagination.
Enable the paginated processor in your config.yaml:
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.paginated
And change the type to paginated, and update the HTML to use pagination:
----
type: paginated
----
{% extends 'layouts/base.j2' %}
{% block content %}
<ul>
{% for page in my.page %}
<li><a href="{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
<div class="pagination">
{% if my.page.prev %}<a href="{{ my.page.prev.url }}">‹ {{ my.page.prev.title }} |</a>
{% else %}‹
{% endif %}
{{ my.page }}
{% if my.page.next %}| <a href="{{ my.page.next.url }}">{{ my.page.next.title }} ›</a>
{% else %}›
{% endif %}
</div>
{% endblock content %}
SCSS AND CLEVERCSS PROCESSORS
These two get associated with .scss and .clevercss files and compile them to CSS files.
processors:
- strange_case.extensions.scss
- strange_case.extensions.clevercss
TESTING
I am currently (as of version 4.0.2) including tests:
> pip install pytest
> py.test
LICENSE
Author:
Colin T.A. Gray
Copyright:
2012 Colin T.A. Gray <http://colinta.com/>
Copyright (c) 2012, Colin T.A. Gray
All rights reserved.
See LICENSE for more details (it’s a simplified BSD license).
License
For personal and professional use. You cannot resell or redistribute these repositories in their original state.
Files:
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