polo

polo is a static site generator created with Go. It's compatible with your current Jekyll and Pelican markdowns, so your migration should be straightforward.

I'm happily using it on my blog: http://agonzalezro.github.io and you can use it in yours! There are other places with completely different templates using it as well: http://k8s.uk/

Yes, I know that there a lot of them out there but I just want mine to learn a little bit of Go coding.

Here are some features:

• Jekyll and Pelican compatible.
• Can watch files for changes and in that case regenerate the site.
• Pretty quick! But new versions will be faster.
• Deploy it to gh-pages or create your own site on github.
• You can easily auto deploy it: example for CircleCI.
• It supports templating, check my personal blog source for an example.

Install

From binary

Find your version here: https://github.com/agonzalezro/polo/releases

Docker

The latest master is always available as a Docker image:

docker run agonzalezro/polo

Remember that you will need to mount volumes and so on.

DIY

If you want to build it yourself, I am using glide for the dependencies. This means that you will need to use Go 1.5 at least:

$ glide install

How to use it?

If you call the binary without any argument you will get the help:

$ polo -h
usage: polo [<flags>] <source> <output>

Static site generator "compatible" with Jekyll & Pelican content.

Flags:
  -h, --help                   Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
  -d, --start-daemon           Start a simple HTTP server watching for markdown changes.
  -p, --port=8080              Port where to run the server.
  -c, --config="config.json"   The settings file.
      --templates-base-path=.  Where the 'templates/' folder resides (in case it exists).
  -v, --verbose                Verbose logging.

Args:
  <source>  Folder where the content resides.
  <output>  Where to store the published files.

The basic usage mode is:

$ polo <source> <output>

If you want a server that watches for you changes, meaning that if you change something in sourcedir the site will be regenerated:

$ polo -d <source> <output>
INFO[0000] Static server running on :8080

There is an example project here, you can use it as <source>.

Configuration file

You can specify your configuration file with the option -c/--config, or just use the default value: config.json.

An example configuration can be found on the file config.json: https://github.com/agonzalezro/polo/blob/master/example/config.json

This is what you can configure:

• author: if it's not override with the Metadata it's the name that is going to be shown on the articles.
• title: title of the site, for the <title> element and the header.
• url: sometimes the full url is needed.
• show{Archive,Categories,Tags}: if it's true the pages are going to be created and the links are going to be added.
• paginationSize: set it to -1 if you want to show all the posts.
• favicon: the favicon path if you have one.

3rd party

• disqusSitename: if you want comments on your site.
• googleAnalyticsId: the Google Analytics ID.
• shareThisPublisher: the ShareThis publisher ID. If provided, there will be some social buttons on the article view.

Content creation with markdown

Whatever thing that is supported by blackfriday library is supported here. The only difference is that I am adding some metadata to the files.

This metadata is using exactly the same format than the one used on Pelican or Jekyll, but we don't support exactly the same keys. If you thing that some of the keys that they support and we don't are needed, please, create an issue or send a pull request.

Supported tags:

• title: if it's not on the metadata info, the first line is going to be used to create it.
• date: format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm
• tags: comma separated.
• slug: if it is not defined the first line is going to be slugified.
• status: if it's draft the page is not going to be rendered.
• summary: an introductory paragraph. It will be empty if the metadata tag is not defined.
• author: this will override the default author in the config file.

This is one auto explainable example for Pelican:

Title: My super title
Date: 2010-12-03 10:20
Tags: thats, awesome
Slug: my-super-post
Author: Federico

And here is just the content.

In this case we are overriding the values of your site configuration for the title, slug & author.

If you prefer the Jekyll format, or you are migrating a Jekyll page:

---
title: My super title
date: 2010-12-03 10:20
tags: thats, awesome
slug: my-super-post
author: Federico
---

And here is just the content.

The keys are case insensitive in both cases.

Templating

This functionality is in a kinda early stage. I think, that we will need to split the templates in much more files, and this way we will be able to override them quite easily, but that will require some work (PRs welcomed! :)

Creating your own theme

You have a default theme on templates/. If you just installed polo this theme is going to be part of the binary but it can be override.

In case that you want to override the theme, you don't need to provide ALL the files. Just providing the ones that you are overriding is more than enough.

For example, imaging that you want to override the header to use another bootstrap theme:

1. Wherever you want (but it needs to be the same place where you run polo from) you create the folder templates/base.
2. Then you edit templates/head/header.html, adding the following content:

{{define "header"}}
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/bootstrap.min.css">
  <link
    href="http://netdna.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.0/css/bootstrap-glyphicons.css"
    rel="stylesheet">
{{end}}

3. Now you run polo from the folder that owns templates/ and
4. PROFIT!

Modifying the one that is going to be included on the binary

If you want to do changes on the default theme, you need to remember that you MUST recreate the binary data. Use the go:generate provided on cmd/polo for that purpose:

$ cd cmd/polo
$ go generate

Auto deploy

You can use your favourite CI/CD platform to generate the sites. I wrote a blog post about how to do it with CircleCI here: http://agonzalezro.github.io/how-to-automagically-generate-your-polo-blog-with-circleci.html