xertz

Pronounced ‘zerts’, it means to gulp something down quickly and/or in a greedy fashion

xertz is a static site generator with first-class support for Markdown and Handlebars templates

Installation and Usage

xertz requires Node.js to be installed and is distributed on npm. It can easily be installed and executed by using the npx tool, which is distributed with newer versions of Node.js.

Commands

npx xertz init [folder_name] - Initializes a new xertz project

npx xertz new [Post Title] - Create a new folder in posts/.

npx xertz serve - Builds and serves a xertz project on http://localhost:8080. Also watches and rebuilds on any changes.

npx xertz build - Buids a xertz project and outputs to _dist folder.

Features

• First class support for SaSS, Markdown and Handlebars templating
• Built in support for AMP
• Code Highligting via Prism.js

Directory Structure

When you initialize a xertz site, a directory will created that looks like this:

|-- my_site
  |-- _layouts
  |-- media
  |-- posts
  |-- styles
  |-- _config.yml
  |-- index.html.hbs

• _layouts - This folder contains Handlebars layouts which will be used to contsruct rendered pages.
• media - This folder contains images and other assets and will be copied as is.
• posts - This folder contains the posts.
• styles - CSS files can be placed here and will be be made available in the template data.
• _config.yml - This is the base config file.
• index.html.hbs - This is the main index page for the site.

Config

Configuration comes from one of these places, in order of precedence:

• Root _config.yml
• _config.yml file in content directory or subdirectory
• Markdown file yaml Front Matter

Templates

A file with the html.hbs extension will be processed as a Handlebars template and have access to pages data which will be an array of all pages in the current and subdirectories.

Markdown

• A file can have a date prefix in its name which will set the date variable.
• By default, the name of the file (minus any date prefix) will be used as the slug variable and effect the output path.

Content Package Directory

If subdirectory of posts/ contains contains a file called index.md, it will be deemed a Content Package Directory. This means all files within the directory will be processed as a unit and copied to a corresponding output directory.

For example, if you had a directory structure defined as:

|-- content
  |-- 2019-03-13-crazy-pets
    |-- index.md
    |-- catz_lol.jpg
    |-- doggy_do_little.jpg  

The 2019-03-13-crazy-pets/ folder is considered a Content Package Directory. It would be output as:

|-- crazy-pets
  |-- index.html
  |-- catz_lol.jpg
  |-- doggy_do_little.jpg  

and accessible at https://youdomain.com/crazy-pets/

Layouts

Any file with a _ prefix is ignored.

Styles

CSS and SaSS can be placed within any folder but when it is placed in the styles/ folder you have access to the styles within templates. This is useful, for example, if you want to inline your styles within a template with <style/> rather than linking to a path with <link rel="stylesheet"/>.

Any file with a _ prefix is ignored.

Handlebars Helpers

The following Handlebars helpers are made available in xertz:

• limit - {{ limit pages 15 }}
• filter - {{ filter pages "type" "post" }}
• iif - {{ iif excerpt site_description }}
• dateFormat - {{ dateFormat "now" "yyyy" }}
• indent - {{{ indent my_text 4 }}}
• group - {{#group pages by="year"}}
• encodeURI - {{#encodeURI site_url}}