Ginger Static Site Generator

Ginger is an very lightweight static site generator based on the jinja template language.

Unlike most static site generators Ginger is designed to work best for sites that are made up from a collection of pages. Ginger does not have the concept of blog posts, tags, categories, authors. If you need something more complicated then Pelican is an obvious next step.

Documentation is very lacking at the moment. This is something I hope to rectify soon.

Installation

pip install ginger

Initial Setup

• mkdir root_dir
• mkdir root_dir/input
• mkdir root_dir/input/templates
• mkdir root_dir/input/templates/styles
• mkdir root_dir/input/templates/scripts
• mkdir root_dir/output

Then create ginger.yml with the following settings

---

    # the yml files for each page. relative to input_dir
    content_dir: pages

    # the directory holding the uncompiled css (relative to templates_dir)
    css_dir: styles

    # the file name of the parent scss file
    css_input_file: main.scss

    # the output file name mask (can use {hash}) to get unique filename based on the contents
    css_output_file_mask: styles.{hash}.css

    # files to copy unmodified from input_dir -> output_dir
    # relative path from templates will remain untouched
    # e.g. template/input/folder/123.png -> output/folder/123.png
    copy_unmodified: ['.*\.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|ico|mp4)']

    # the default jinja template to use if not specified in the yml
    default_template: page.html

    # the directory holding the javascript.
    # js files will get concatenated into a single file named after the folder
    # e.g. vendor/a.js and vendor/b.js -> vendor.js
    js_dir: scripts

    # The format to name the javascript. Can use {name} and {hash}
    js_output_file_mask: "{name}.{hash}.js"

    # length of the hash to include in the filename
    filename_hash_length: 8

    # the directory holding all our template and content files
    input_dir: input

    # where should we save the resulting html
    output_dir: output

    # Should we keep the contents of the output directory each time we rebuild?
    preserve_output_on_rebuild: False

    # where can we find the templates (relative to input_dir)
    templates_dir: templates

During development run

ginger --dev --watch

The --dev or -d flag means that the css and js files aren't minified. This is both for speed reasons and to ease viewing the source code whilst developing. The --watch (or w) flag will watch the input folder for changes and recreate your output folder.

Finally run

ginger

Which rebuilds the output minifying the css and js