tobiko

a JavaScript static site generator with support for WordPress

Usage

CLI

$ tobiko
$ tobiko -h

Options:
  --file, -f     path to config file                    [default: "tobiko.json"]
  --watch, -w    watch mode
  --help, -h     Show help                                             [boolean]
  --version, -v  Show version number                                   [boolean]

API

const tobiko = require('tobiko');
const conf = require('./tobiko.js');
tobiko(conf);

Config file

By default, the CLI tobiko will look for tobiko.js. If dynamic options are needed, they can be declared in a JavaScript file:

// tobiko.js
module.exports = {
	contentsDir: 'contents',
	outDir: 'dist',
	handlebars: {
		templatesDir: 'templates',
		partialsDir: 'templates/partials',
		helpersDir: 'templates/helpers'
	},
	plugins: {
		wordpress: {
			apiRoot: 'https://mywordpress.com/wp-json/wp/v2',
			contents: [{
				postType: 'posts',
				folder: 'articles',
				template: 'article.hbs'
			}]
		},
		archive: {
			articles: {
				postsPerPage: 4,
				title: 'Articles',
				template: 'articles.hbs'
			}
		},
		transform: function (contentTree) {
			// do something with the content object
			return Promise.resolve(contentTree)
		}
	}
};

$ tobiko -f tobiko.js

What's supported

• Content: JSON / Markdown (optionally with YAML frontmatter) / WordPress (through WP REST API)
• Template: Handlebars
• Styles: SCSS
• JavaScript: browserify (but it can really be anything)

Documentation

Options

• contentsDir: where the site's contents are located. Defaults to contents.
• outDir: where to generate the static files to. Defaults to dist.
• handlebars: Handlebars configuration options.
  • templatesDir: location of the templates directory. Defaults to templates.
  • partialsDir: location of template partials. Defaults to templates/partials.
  • helpersDir: location of template helpers. Defaults to templates/helpers.
• plugins: configuration for plugins. See plugins for more info.

For all the default options, see lib/defaultOptions.js.

Contents

By default, the site content will be in the contents folder. This option could be changed in tobiko.json, under contentDir property.

Content can be written in json and markdown with yaml frontmatter.

The structure of the contents directory will be reflected in the final static HTML output.

config.json

High level, site-wide configurations can be specified in config.json in the root folder. Environment-specific configurations are also supported.

For example:

config.json

{
    "site-name": "Tobiko Example",
    "site-url": "http://tobiko.io",
    "author": "Sushi Connoisseur"
}

config.dev.json

{
    "site-url": "http://localhost:4000",
}

Environment-specific settings cascade over the original config. This allows you to declare only the different parameters.

Nesting

In any directory, a file's sibling files and directories are available for the template to access. This is a convenient and structural way to store and organize data, instead of dumping everything into a single JSON file.

For example, for this file structure

contents
├── index.json
└── cars
    ├── 1.tesla.json
    ├── 2.ford.json
    ├── 3.volve.json
    ├── 4.honda.json
    ├── 5.toyota.json
    └── accessories
        └── spoiler.json

If you're writing the template for index.json, its own content is available through the content variable.

  <h1>{{content.title}}</h1>

And cars are also available as

  <ul>
  {{#each cars}}
    <li><h2>{{title}}</h2></li>
  {{/each}}
  </ul>

  <div class="spoiler">
    {{cars.accessories.spoiler}}
  </div>

The numbered files are used to organize the order of the children.

template property

Each page specifies a template that it uses, either as a JSON property or YAML frontmmatter. If a file doesn't specify a template, its data is available to be used in the ContentTree but will not be rendered.

Example:

index.json

{
  template: "index.hbs",
  content: "Hello World"
}

index.md

---
template: index.hbs
---
Hello World

filepath

By default, the path of the page is its directory structure. For example, the page contents/articles/06/a-new-day.json will have the URL http://your-website.com/articles/06/a-new-day.html.

However, each page's path can be overwritten by a filepath property. Example, the file above can have the following property,

{
  filepath: "articles/a-new-day.json"
}

which will give it a URL http://your-website.com/articles/a-new-day.html.

This could be useful as a way to order files in a directory structure. In the cars example above:

contents
├── index.json
└── cars
    ├── 1.tesla.json
    ├── 2.ford.json
    ├── 3.volve.json
    ├── 4.honda.json
    ├── 5.toyota.json
    └── accessories
        └── spoiler.json

In order to avoid the number 1, 2, 3 etc. appear in these cars' URLs, they could have a custom filepath property, such as cars/tesla.json.

date

Post or page date is supported by declaring property date in JSON or YAML. Any ISO-8601 string formats for date is supported.

By default, a file without a date specified will have the date value of when the file was created. (To be more exact, it will have the ctime value when grunt is first run).

See momentjs for more information about the date format.

Templates

By default tobiko uses Handlebars as its templating engine.

Helpers and Partials are supported. They can be stored under helpers and partials directories under templates. These directory names of course can be changed in options object.

Each page needs to specify its own template. This can be done with a JSON property

{
  template: index.hbs
}

or in the YAML frontmatter. A file with no template property will not be rendered.

Context

Each template will be passed in a context object generated from the content file with the following properties:

• content: the content file
• content.main: the parsed HTML if the content file is a markdown file
• content.filename: name of the content file
• content.fileext: extension type of the content file
• content.url: url of the page
• config: see config
• global: all data in the contents directory
• Other sub-directories included in the same directory is accessible in the template with nesting.

Plugins

Tobiko can be extended with plugins. By default, it comes with 3 plugins:

WordPress

While static site can be a great way to publish content, managing them using the file system can feel clunky at times. It is not too friendly for non-developers. As such, tobiko allows you to pull in content from WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems. With WP REST API, content from WordPress can be exported to a system like tobiko.

After installing the WP API plugin, you can start using it in tobiko by configuring it in options. For example:

  wordpress: {
    apiRoot: 'http://your-wordpress-url.com/wp-json/wp/v2',
    contents: [{
      postType: 'posts',
      folder: 'articles',
      template: 'article.hbs'
    }]
  }

The folder key defines where the WordPress content is put on the content tree.

Archives and Pagination

A directory with a big number of posts could be configured to paginate. The paginated pages are called archives. The option for enabling archives can be added to options. For example:

  archive: {
    articles: {
      postsPerPage: 4,
      template: 'articleArchive.hbs',
      title: 'Articles'
    }
  }

Each key in the archives object represents the name of the directory to be paginated. Each value can have the following options:

• orderby: (string) how to order the posts in the archives. Default to 'date'
• postsPerPage: (number) number of posts to be displayed per archive page
• template: (string) the template used to display these archive pages
• title: (string) title of these archive pages (this will be made available to use in template as content.title)

The paginated content in each archive page is accessible in the template file under content.posts.

The archives plugin can be used in combination with the wordpress plugin to paginate WordPress content.

Transform

The transform plugin allows you to perform any type of modification/ transformation of the content tree.

In order to do so, instead of passing in a JS object like the other plugins for options, transform takes a function that accepts the contentTree object as an argument, and returns a promise that will resolve with a value that is the new contentTree.

Deployment

The site can be deployed to Github Pages or any static site hosting solutions.

In order to deploy to Github Pages, you can use gh-pages.

Examples

Some examples of how tobiko is used

• tnguyen14/tridnguyen.com

Issues/ Requests

Any issues, questions or feature requests could be created under Github Issues.