The Static Site Solution In Modern Python

It's simp with 3 s!

A simple tool to generate a static website while being able to use powerful HTML templates (Jinja2), Markdown files converted to HTML, and other preprocessors.

I wanted a simple way to generate static websites and I like Jinja2. I had previous experiences working with Jekyll but it seemed like too much work to setup everytime and overkill for the job as it supports many features I don't necessarily use.

One of the main goals with sssimp is being able to generate a usable website without any configuration file or dependency. You only install the sssimp package and run it.

Requirement: Python 3.8 or later

pip install --user sssimp

Create a folder called input, it will hold the data to generate the site.

Running sssimp will generate content in the output folder.

Input and output destination can be changed:

sssimp --input ../some-other/input-dir ~/some-other/output-dir

Use python -m sssimp --help for more details.

• Files placed in input/content will be directly copied to the output folder

  Example: input/content/favicon.png -> output/favicon.png

• HTML files with the suffix .html placed in input/content will be parsed as Jinja2 templates, they can use templates defined in input/templates. See the Jinja2 documentation

  Example: input/content/index.html -> output/index.html Starting with content

  {% extends "base.html" %}
  
  ...

  Will use the template input/templates/base.html

• CSS files in input/css will be merged together in a single file output/bundle.css

• Markdown files with the suffix .md placed in input/content will be parsed to HTML and passed to a template with the same name as their parent folder as the parameter markdown

  Example: ./input/content/post/hello-world.md -> ./output/post/hello-world.html Using the template ./input/templates/post.html Generated with context {'markdown': 'the markdown file converted to HTML'}

  The template name can be overriden using the markdown meta argument "template"

  Example: ./input/content/post/special.md -> ./output/post/special.html Starting with content

  ---
  template: special.html
  ---
  
  ...

  Will use the template ./input/templates/special.html instead of post.html

• Files placed in input/data will exposes their content in templates inside the data variable. They can be in either YAML or JSON. The path is part of their position in the data structure tree.

  Example: ./input/data/categories/tech.yml With content

  description: Nerdy stuff
  color: #121212
  related:
    - computers
    - dev

  Will populate the data variable in templates as so:

  {
    "categories": [
      {
        "tech": {
          "description": "Nerdy stuff",
          "color": "#121212",
          "related": ["computers", "dev"]
        }
      }
    ]
  }

See the example branch for an example input folder or my personal website https://github.com/Tina-otoge/tina-simp for a real-world example.

• |a makes any relative path point to the top of the output folder.

  Example: input/content/blog/post/tech/2021/11/some-post.html -> output/blog/post/tech/2021/11/some-post.html With content

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ "style.css"|a }}">

  Will be rendered as "../../../../style.css"

  See also the <base> element

• page is a sssimp.generators.html.Page, it contains many information about the current document. Markdown files are an instance of sssimp.generators.markdown.MarkdownPage instead, which inherits from Page

  This variable itself contains many useful variables:

  • page.modified_at and page.created_at (modified_at forcibly set to None if same as created_at)

  • page.href: The path to the file relative to the output folder

  • page.src: A pathlib.Path object of the source file in the input folder

  • page.target A pathlib.Path object of the target file in the output folder

  • page.name: Shortcut for page.target.name, the filename of the outputed file

  • page.parent: Shortcut for page.target.parent, the name of the parent directory in the output folder file

  • page.meta: The Markdown meta variables, prefixing a var with = will interpret it as raw JSON Example

    ---
    some_var: some value
    something_else: 42
    some_tags:= ["tag1", "tag2"]
    ---
    
    My cool blog post
    ...

    The meta variable will always contain a template which will resolve to the parent directory name with .html appended if none is set in the meta fields.

    The page.meta variable is None for raw HTML pages, this avoids KeyErrors when trying to filter pages by a specific meta variable.

• plain_text¹: A plain text representation of the Markdown file

• markdown¹: The Markdown content converted to HTML

• meta¹: A shortcut for page.meta

• title¹: Returns page.meta.title if it exists, else the filename with the characters - and _ replaced by whitespaces, the suffix removed and the first letter capitalized.

  Example: input/content/some-cool-page.md's title is "Some cool page"

• BUNDLE_FILE always evaluates to "bundle.css" for now

• BUNDLE_TIME modification time of the latest updated file in input/css, very useful to make the browser refresh the file only if any of the CSS files changed.

  Example:

  <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ BUNDLE_FILE}}?{{ BUNDLE_TIME }}">

• PAGES a list of sssimp.generators.html.Page objects containing every HTML and Markdown files sourced by the site. You can loop over it to generate an index. In conjunction with looking up meta values it can be used to filter by content type.

  Example:

  {% for page in PAGES if page.meta.template == 'post.html' %}
  <a href="{{ page.href }}">{{ page.title }}</a>
  <div class="tags">
    {% for tag in page.meta.tags %}
    <span class="tag">{{ tag }}</span>
    {% endfor %}
  </div>
  Posted on <time>{{ page.created_at }}</time>
  {% endfor %}