arcgen

Minimalist static site generator, powered by Node.js & nanogen

This version has a focus on archiving original media, meaning it has tools to re-format media allowing for originals to live along side compressed versions.

more documentation and template recipe examples coming soon!

Features

• Generate HTML pages from Markdown files.
• EJS templates files
• Support for site metadata from a global file and specific data for individual pages via YAML frontmatter.
• Support for partials, blocks of reusable interface components.
• Compression and generation of web-ready srcset images from full res images.
• Copies local media to exact locations in the build process, inside subdirectories and on a page by page basis
• Support for page ordering using 00_ style numbered filename prefixes, the prefixes will be removed from filenames on build to keep paths tidy.
• A page JSON object, available in your template, to get access to the current page's YAML front matter and the keys outlined below.
• A pages array, available in your template, containing json objects for each of the page definitions across the entire site. (useful for navigation and collections)

The page & pages objects have a few reserved keys you should not use in your front matter (they will be overwritten).

• url – the root relative absolute url to the page
• media – an array of root relative absolute paths to the media files associated with the page
• depth – the depth of the page in the orginizational folder structure
• parent – the parent of the current page in the folder structure

Getting started

Prerequisites

• Node.js installed (version 8 or above)

Install

You may install it globally with:

npm i -g arcgen

Creating a new site

To create a brand new site, navigate to the folder you want your site to be and run:

arcgen init

This will create a initial site structure like this:

/
  src/
    assets/
    layouts/
    pages/
    partials/
  site.config.js

There is already a default layout inside the layouts folder, but you may add more.

Inside the pages folder is where you put .md and media files that will generate the pages of the final site. Any file name and folder structure used here will be transposed to the resulting site.

Build the current site and open with a live reload server:

$ arcgen start [options]

options:

• -i, --imagecompress EXPERIMENTAL: run the srcset web ready image compressor (can take all of the compression flags below)
• -c, --config Path to the config file (default: site.config.js)
• -p, --port Port to use for local server (default: 3000)

Build the current site without a server:

$ arcgen build [options]

Same options as start.

generate srcset compressed & optimized images:

This feature will take all source images and create 3 versions at smaller sizes and place them into a specificed subdirectory.

It's likely a better idea to do this before building or starting the site as a 2 step process since it's unlikely you will need to re-compress images regularily. Skips existing image files, you'll need to manually delete sub directories / images to re-compress images again. A deletion feature may be added in the future.

$ arcgen compress [options]

options:

• -t, --type Force the image type for the compression, none respects the original filetype .jpg | .png | .webp | none (default: none)
• -d, --directory Set the path for compressed images to be saved to (default: /srcset)
• -s, --maxsize Set the maximum image size in pixels, srcset will be divided down from this (default: 2000)
• -q, --quality Set the quality of the image exports; 1-100. Image type dependent. (default: 100)

arcgen global options

• -h, --help Display the help text in the terminal
• -v, --version Display arcgen version

Docs & examples

coming soon?

Authors

• Ben Moren – arcgen
• Derek Anderson && Ben Moren – mcadgen
• Douglas Matoso - Initial work - doug2k1

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details