sticks: a dead simple static site generator

sticks is a tiny and customizable static site generator.

it leverages hakyll and pandoc to great extent, and so checks in at just under 50 lines of haskell.

features

html templating: directly through pandoc
support for markdown, restructured text, asciidoc, org-mode...
[todo] renders latex and typst directly to pdfs
supports pandoc flavoured markdown, including:
lists with meaningful numeric order
line blocks and nested quotes
code blocks
a wide variety of tables
inline latex via mathml
yaml metadata blocks

usage

$ stack build
$ stack exec sticks -- --help
Usage: sticks [-v|--verbose] COMMAND

  sticks - Static site compiler created with Hakyll

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text
  -v,--verbose             Run in verbose mode

Available commands:
  build                    Generate the site
  check                    Validate the site output
  clean                    Clean up and remove cache
  rebuild                  Clean and build again
  server                   Start a preview server
  watch                    Autocompile on changes and start a preview server.

about

pandoc (and by extension hakyll and sticks) operates on: - files containing metadata and content, and - templates containing variables and expressions.

files may be prefixed with a YAML metadata block ("front matter") declaring variables (ex. title, subtitle, author...) for use by templates. a special template variable denotes the template to be used. without a template entry in the metadata block, they will be assumed to be free-standing documents (disregarding YAML front matter).

templates are simply an html, or pdf, or etc file containing the content needed (ex. header and footer material) for a free-standing document. they must contain the special $body$ variable somewhere for file injection. they may refer to variables declared by files with $variable$ . basic control flow is also supported and is documented in the pandoc manual (note only the $foo$ syntax is supported, not ${foo}).

sticks expects all templates to be placed in the _templates folder and will throw an error for any templates referenced by front matter that do not exist there. templates may include each other with the $partial("_template/template.html")$ syntax.

the aforementioned YAML metadata blocks may be placed before files of any type. they look like the following:

---
template: default
title: a really cool document
subtitle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
---