Seagull

Static site generators - always 'unopinionated'. Well this one is opinionated. ie. it has a standard set of functionality and it does it well.

Make some posts, make some pages or other types of page, run this program and you've got a static site.

Getting Started

Your first site is only a few commands away:

$ npm install -g seagull
$ mkdir mysite
$ cd mysite
$ seagull init
$ seagull build
$ seagull serve

Bam! Open http://localhost:3000 and you'll be able to click around.

Layout

├── config.json
├── content
├── static
├── dist
└── views

Stick some Markdown files with extension *.mdinto content (and set the type in the front matter to be 'page' or 'post') For front matter, put some JSON at the top of the file and end it with a newline, three dashes and another newline:

{
  "title": "First Post",
  "published": "2015-06-05T03:11:41.849Z",
  "type": "post"
}
---
## First Post ##

This is the content.

Future Posts

To publish a page or post in the future, just set the published date to be in the future. Note: of course, seagull can't publish this automatically since it is a static site generator, so you'll have to re-generate and push your content when necessary. Perhaps set up a cron somewhere to do this regularly.

Draft Posts

For a post to be considered draft, set published in the front matter to false.

{
  ...
  "published": false,
  ...
}

Other Page Types

The only type of page that is special is the post type, since they are used to generate lots of blog specific pages (such as the archive, pageified pages, categories, tags and author pages.

If you use any other type than post, then it is rendered as a normal page but using the view named after it. For example, if you have a page of type recipe, then the views/recipe.pug file is rendered. If you have a type page (remember, page is not special), then the views/page.pug is rendered.

For example, let's make a page type of map called wellington.md:

{
  "type": "map",
  "lon": -41.2889,
  "lat": 174.7772
}
---
Welcome to the Middle of Middle Earth.

Then a view called views/map.pug is rendered. You can of course render it anyway you like, perhaps extend the same layout as other pages or a completely different one. You may also wish to render the content too.

Other ideas for diffferent page types:

• image
• gallery
• recipe

ChangeLog

• 2019-07-16: v0.19.0
  • updated to use Pug instead of Jade
  • updated all other packages so npm audit was okay
• 2015-07-08: v0.9.0
  • added eslint for development (with many updates)
  • new tests for example sites - runs on TravisCI
  • 'published' config to set a fixed time for publishing
  • check the 'files' directory exists (skip if not)
  • check the 'content' directory exists (skip if not)
  • updates to package.json
• 2015-06-29: v0.8.4
  • Various fixes
  • Now deals with an empty site better
• 2015-06-29: v0.8.2
  • Make seagull.js be executable using "/usr/bin/env node"
• 2015-06-29: v0.8.1
  • Add seagull.js as a bin in package.json
• 2015-06-29: v0.8.0
  • Refactored everything
  • Views are easier to manage/load
  • Create and render the archive pages
  • Quit if a view doesn't exist
  • Create and render category pages
  • Create and render tag pages
  • Create and render author pages
  • Create Atom feeds
  • Create RSS feeds
  • Create and render pagified indexes e.g. page-1, page-2, etc
  • Add a sitemap which consists of all posts and other page types
  • Various fixes
• 2015-06-07: v0.3.0
  • Added the ability to render the main /index.html file
• 2015-06-07: v0.2.0
  • Merge all content into '/content/' instead of '/pages/' and '/posts/'
• 2015-06-06: v0.1.0
  • Initial release
  • Render *.html files for all pages and all posts

(Ends)