Webifier

How to Use • Docs • License

Webifier is a stand-alone build tool for converting any repository into a deployable jekyll website. You can define your pages via yaml files and provide notebooks, markdown and pdf and other files for Webifier to render. It uses python markdown providing additional control over attributes and other extensive functionalities. It lets you define and direct how your web pages feel and automatically manages your assets, making it a perfect solution for fast static website development and a straightforward tool for creating Github pages as a Github action. Webifier is a good fit for the missing puzzle piece of collaborative content creation on Github and is a great tool for sharing educational material on the web.

Webifier lets you communicate with your audience through comments with the help of utterances and track their engagement through Google Analytics. It also automatically creates a static search engine with the help of Jekyll-Simple-Search. And as a cherry on the cake, you can provide custom jinja2 templates if the built-in ones do not satisfy your needs. Plus, you can change the behavior of the rendering stage of Webifier by providing your custom implementation of assets, _includes, and _layouts in your repository.

How to Use

Locally

In order to see how your webified pages look before you send it out to the world, you might want to build and serve them locally. For this you would need both webifier and jekyll installed.

1. Install Jekyll.
2. Install webifier from PYPI (webifier uses python>=3.8 therefore you might need to install an appropriate python version beforehand):

   pip install webifier
   

3. Change your working directory to where your website resides and Webify everything (assuming your initial index file is index.yml, and you want the results to go to webified)

   # cwd should be where your files are
   webify --index=index.yml --output=webified
   

4. Change your working directory to the webified results and serve jekyll:

    cd webified
    jekyll serve
   

   You can now access your website from localhost:4000 by default.

Github

Using Webifier for your repositories is as simple as adding it as a step in your deployment workflow. After checking out your desired repository, add the Webifier action and change the default values for baseurl, repo, and index input variables to your needs. After that you are good to deploy your Webified website for which there are a number of great actions available.

Your workflow might look something like follows. We are using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages deploy action as an example here and you can replace it with any other deployment action or even push the webified results into a separate github branch manually. Keep in mind that because the results are pushed to a separate branch, you might need to change the Github Pages source branch from your repository settings under the Pages section.

name: Webify & Deploy
on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ]
jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # you need to checkout your code before webifying
      - name: Checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Webify
        uses: webifier/build@master # or select a desired version

      # the deploy action is in charge of pushing back the 
      #     webified files into a separate branch such as `gh-pages`
      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3 # or use any other jekyll deploy action
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          enable_jekyll: true
          publish_dir: ./webified/

Note that if you wish to webify a <name>.github.io repository or do not wish to have the content of your repository to be referred to with a /<repository-name>/ slug, you should provide baseurl: '' to the webifier action. It is highly suggested that you consult the documentations for further details of the nuts and bolts of webifiable materials. You can also look at the documentations' code which itself is built using Webifier and greatly showcases its functionalities.

License

MIT License, see webifier/build/LICENSE.

Todo

There are a number of improvements that can enlarge Webifier's usability. What follows is a list of the ideas that we have in mind, feel free to suggest your ideas by opening up a feature request issue.

• Print content: add automatic print (and export as pdf) functionality for content content (markdown/notebook) pages.
• Table of Content: add automatic creation of a customizable multi-level table of content for all pages.