obelisk

Static Site Generator written in Elixir.

Goals

Fast. Static websites can take a long time to generate when they start to grow large. obelisk should take advantage of Elixir’s multithreaded behaviour to increase this speed.
Simple, Obvious. It should be very straight forward to add new content and modify the way that your site works.
Templatable. It should be possible to store templates in github repos and reference them directly, allowing modification of the look and feel of a site instantaneously with no manual installation.

Creating a new obelisk project

To create a new obelisk project, we use mix

$ mix new blog

We then modify our dependencies within mix.exs to include obelisk, as well as the Erlang library yamerl.

defp deps do
  [{ :obelisk, "~> 0.2.1" },
   { :yamerl, github: "yakaz/yamerl"]
end

Next we need to download obelisk and compile it

$ mix deps.get
$ mix deps.compile

Now for the fun stuff, we can initialize our obelisk project

$ mix obelisk init

We can build our obelisk project now. It will look pretty basic without modifications to the layout (explained below), and some content.

$ mix obelisk build

Structure

Now that we’ve got our project, you will notice that an obelisk project is set out with the following structure

/
/site.yml
/assets/
/assets/css/
/assets/js/
/assets/img/
/posts/
/drafts/
/pages/
/layout/

At the moment, the supported directories are the assets directory, the layout directory, and the posts directory.

Creating a new post

Obelisk expects blog post content to be located in the /posts directory, with filenames using the format YYYY-mm-dd-post-title.markdown. Any file matching this pattern will be processed and built into the /build directory.

You can use the post command to quickly create a new post with todays date, although creating the file manually will also work.

$ mix obelisk post "New obelisk feature"

Creating a draft

Just like the post above us, we can create a draft. Drafts are intended to hold works in progress, and won’t be compiled into the /build directory when running the build command.

Again, the draft command can be used to quickly create a new draft, although creating the file manually will also work.

$ mix obelisk draft "Still working on this"

Front matter

Like other static site generators, posts should include front matter at the top of each file.

---
title: My brand new blog post
img: relative/path/to/bobby.png
author: Bobby Tables
twitter: littlebobbytables
---

Post content goes here

Now within the post.eex template, which we’ll talk about a bit further down, we can access these value like this:

<div class="author">
  <a href="http://twitter.com/#{@frontmatter.twitter}">
    <img src="#{@frontmatter.img}" />
    <%= @frontmatter.author %>
  </a>
</div>

The asset “pipeline”

The asset “pipeline” is extremely simple at this stage. Anything under your /assets directory is copied to /build/assets when the mix obelisk build task is run.

Layouts

Everything under the /layout directory is used to build up your site, and the Elixir template languate Eex is used.

post.eex is the template which wraps blog post content. The @content variable is used within this template to specify the location that the converted markdown content is injected.

index.eex is the template which wraps your index page, which for now is intented to hold the list of blog posts. This template provides 3 variables. Similar to the post template, the index template provides @content, which is the list of blog posts (at this stage as html links). The other two variables, @next and @prev provide links to move between index pages. Each index page contains 10 blog posts, ordered from newest to oldest. The pages are created with the following pattern:

index.html
index2.html
...
index8.html

layout.eex is the template which wraps every page. This is the template that should include your <html>, <head> and <body> tags. This template provides 3 variables also. Again, the @content variable is provided, which specifies where to inject the content from whichever page is being built. Additionally, the @css and @js variables are provided, which include the html markdown for all of the files (not folders) directly under /build/assets/css and /build/assets/js respectively. These files are written to the page in alphabetical order, so if a particual order is required (i.e reset.css first), then the current solution is to rename the files to match the order in which they should be imported:

/assets/css/0-reset.css
/assets/css/1-layout.css
/assets/css/2-style.css