This is the world's dumbest static site generator. It's designed to meet my immediate needs, and no other, and its basically a short bash script that wraps Pandoc. I wrote it this way because I dabbled in other Static Site Generators and found them too complex for my own needs.
You need Pandoc installed, and it's been tested with version pandoc 3.1.1. You need find and sed.
Clone this repo. That's your starting point. If you use scripts/clean_history.sh, it will remove all the existing commits from this repository, and give you a 100% clean starting point, with no history behind it. That step is optional, but recommended.
Add your pages into the pages folder. They can be markdown, or HTML. NB: HTML gets no processing or templating applied. You can build your folder structure as you see fit. Write your links as relative links that link the specific Markdown files: i.e.:
This is my page.
[This links to a page at the same level](otherpage.md).
[This links to a subdirectory](somesubdir/anotherpage.md).
[This links up a level](../parentPage.md)All your HTML pages need YAML front matter for Pandoc to correctly process them. Currently, the only required variable is the title field. Feel free to read up on Pandoc's templates and extend default.html however you like. Each variable you use in your default template is another variable you can use in the front matter. Proper usage and design of these variables is left as an exercise to the reader. It's pandoc's problem, honestly.
Currently, templates/default.html is the template used to control the HTML output. Modify that template to create the look and feel for the page you want. Currently, it does basically nothing but provide a bare minimum layout.
Put them anywhere under the pages folder. I don't care. For convenience, I've added an assets folder, which is ideally where you might drop any CSS, JavaScript, or possibly images. If it's in the pages folder, though, it'll be accessible anywhere in your pages.
Run scripts/build.sh. Put the contents of the output directory on a web server.
Because web development is too hard, too complicated, and involves too many moving parts. I want a simple way to manage a site. I want it to be as stupid as I am. I don't want loads of features. I want to take some simple documents, and render them as HTML, and have a simple way to upload those. There is no magic, beyond calling out to Pandoc. Pandoc is incredibly complicated, and I don't fully know all of the things it can do. It doesn't matter, though, because Pandoc is the only piece of magic in this tool, and Pandoc has great documentation. If you understand Pandoc, you understand how to use this tool. If you don't understand Pandoc, well, you can still basically get a simple site up and running, with minimal HTML.
TL;DR: It's dumb because I'm dumb.
Eventually, I'll come up with a way for you to specify which templates you want to use. Eventually it'll support partials. For right now, it's the dumbest, simplest static site generator you can have. I don't forsee this having many more features than that.