YASSB (Yet Another Static Site Builder)

YASSB is a static website builder. It processes HTML, SCSS, JavaScript/TypeScript, JSX/TSX, JSON, MarkDown (with optional Front Matter data) and many more files of your choice and combines them in beautiful static HTML files.

YASSB is built with TypeScript, and is shipped, with all its definitions, in JavaScript as a Universal Module (umd), so it runs "natively" in node. It can be easily extended with TypeScript/Javascript functions to tailor it to your needs.

Core features

YASSB is simple, yet powerful, it supports:

• composition of web pages by injecting HTML components (e.g. injection of <header> ... </header> defined in components/header.html);
• rendering of multiple or single HTML pages from MarkDown and Text files, with support of Front Matter, as seen in Hugo, Jekyll and others.
• generation at compilation time of dynamically defined components via built-in or custom directives and renderers;
• renderers defined in vanilla JS/TS, or JSX/TSX (for example with renderToStaticMarkup from react-dom/server);
• i18n and localization (multi-language sites).

Demo, guides and docs

Keep reading below for a quick tour on how to get started and the basics on how to use YASSB.

For a complete description and technical details on what YASSB can do for you, check out:

• a working Demo of the landing page for this project, built with YASSB!
• the guides with many explanations and examples of what you can do with YASSB;
• the complete docs with the technical details of how YASSB works under the hood.

Installation

npm i -g yassb-web

or

yarn global add yassb-web

Create a new project

yassb new myStaticWebSite

and

cd myStaticWebSite

Build the project into a static web site

yassb build

or

yassb watch // w/ live reloading!

build: production-ready build of the website

YASSB generates the full website with compressed html and minified js and css. All additional static assets are also copied to the out folder.

For the options that can be passed to YASSB see configuration.

watch: website development

YASSB builds all the files in your project and watches for any changes. On each change, YASSB recompiles the project. To save time, only assets that need to be recompiled are processed.

While in watch mode, the processed website is served on http://localhost:[PORT]. By default port 3000 is used, unless a custom value is provided under devServerPort in the configuration.

For the full list of options that can be passed to YASSB see the configuration.

Serving on localhost

The serve command is also available to serve the website locally without recompiling it:

yassb serve

This will launch the server on http://localhost:[PORT]. By default port 3000 is used, unless a custom value is provided under devServerPort in the configuration.

Please note that the server is very limited and should not be used as-is in production.

Project structure

A YASSB project in it's simplest form is just HTML pages. Plain and simple.

More complex sites can be composed, alongside with HTML files, also with many more file formats, including MarkDown and JSON. Additionally, custom directives and custom renderers can be used to automatically generate and populate your files.

A typical YASSB project is organized in different folders and subfolders. The predefined structure of a project can be fully personalised when configuring YASSB.

How web pages are generated

The starting point for building a website with YASSB is to add a index.html file in pages. If you created your project with yassb new [projectname] a simple template is already there as an example.

Because YASSB works with HTML files, any page you put in your pages is already a valid HTML file that you can serve statically from any web server.

Each html file in this folder will become a page on your website. In this folder you should put the index file of your website (index.html), and any other individual page you might want to have on your website (e.g. about.html, contact.html, products/awesome-thing.html, etc.).

To reuse the same HTML code across multiple pages, you can put HTML snippets in dedicated HTML files in components (e.g. header.component.html). These are injected into pages at compilation time by the component directive.

If you have lists of things, instead of manually typing them, you can generate the lists with the create-from-data-source directive. The data source JSON files must placed in the folder data-sources. Custom renderes (JS/TS/JSX/TSX functions) can be provided to generate any kind of list/layout.

If you have some text that you'd like to write in MarkDown (e.g. blog posts), you'll place the template for the pages to be generated in pages-to-generate. For each .md file provided (from anywhere on your disk), the generate-from-files directive will create a new HTML file with the content of the .md file processed as html.

Because generating files might create a lot of fles, you will probably want to create custom indexes. To do so, you will only need to add to any HTML file the public-file-list directive to specify the path for which you want to create a list of file found at such path. Custom renderes (JS/TS/JSX/TSX functions) can be provided to generate any kind of layout.

Development

Contributions in the form of PR and issues are encouraged, and if you'd like to get involved you are also welcome to become a mainainer.

To get started fork and git clone this repository.

Then run

yarn install

If you are using Visual Studio Code, you are pretty much ready to start editing the source code.

ESLint will take care of signaling any formatting you should be aware of, except code indentation. For varous reasons, as of now, there's not an ESLint rule to enforce the indentation style in this project. Please use 2 white spaces for indentation.

Once you are ready, you can build the JS bundle by running the following commnad in the console:

npm run build-yassb

This will generate a new bundle in the bundle dir.

You can now even try the freshly made bundle by processing the landing page for this project.

Run:

npm run build-landing

Then run

npm run serve

And visit che localhost at port 3000.

Happy coding!

I need more info

Check out:

• a working Demo of the landing page for this project, built with YASSB!
• the guides with many explanations and examples of what you can do with YASSB;
• the complete docs with the technical details of how YASSB works under the hood.