Table of Contents

• Installation
• Example
• How does it work?
• API Documentation
• Plugins
• Development Setup
• How does it compare?
• What dependencies does it have?
• License

Features

• extremely simple: the API exposes one function!
• easy to understand: only ~180 SLOC!
• very modern: works very well with async functions (node 7.6+)
• fast as lightning: because it's so simple, it takes almost no time to build a site!

Installation

You need Node.js 7.6 or higher.

npm install --save awoo

Example

Let's write a simple program that changes the content of all files in a directory to "hey, what's up":

const awoo = require('awoo')
 
// this is the simplest plugin you can build!
// conveniently, plugins are just normal functions
const plugin = () => {
  // replace all file contents with the string
  return files => files.map(file => {
    file.contents = `hey, what's up`
    return file
  })
}
 
// enter our main function:
// the main function should be an async function so that
// it automatically returns a promise
awoo(async site => {
  // we register our plugin...
  site.use(plugin)
  // ...and initiate the build process
  return site
})

Let's save this as example.js. To run it, you need Node.js version 7.6 or higher. The latest stable version will work.

node example.js

awoo doesn't output logs by default. If you want logs (for example, for debugging), you can set the DEBUG environment variable to:

awoo # for base logs 
awoo:read # for specific read logs 
awoo:write # for specific write logs 
 
# you can also combine any of the three 
awoo,awoo:read

To get all logs at once, you can just set the variable to awoo*.

DEBUG=awoo* node my_script # full logging! 

awoo plugins may implement logging with different DEBUG names.

How does it work?

It's fairly simple! What awoo does can be split up into two things:

• First, it reads a directory and saves all of the information about each file into a gigantic array. That object can be manipulated by plugins, which makes awoo actually do things.
• After most plugins are run, awoo writes the files as they are described in the gigantic array to disk.

It's that simple! Static site generators aren't rocket science or whatever. If you got confused by looking at the Jekyll source code once, that's because Jekyll is more fully fledged than awoo is, that is, it provides some defaults.

But static site generators, at their core, are just programs that take a set of files, do something to them, and then output those files. That's it. The rest is just transformations on those files.

awoo's goal is to reduce that essence to its very base, and to give you a bunch of building blocks with which you can make your ideal site, using only the stuff you need!

API Documentation

The docs are published on our website.

Plugins

Official plugins are kept at awoojs/core!

Since it's really easy to write awoo plugins, anyone can make and publish one! If you make a plugin, you should add a GitHub topic awoo and probably also add awoo as a keyword in your package.json.

Here's a list of all awoo plugins on GitHub

Development

To work on this repository, clone it and install the npm dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/awoojs/awoo.git
cd awoo
npm install

There are a couple of npm scripts provided for convenience:

• npm test - runs linters and ava in ci mode
• npm run lint - runs linters
• npm run ava - only runs ava once
• npm run ava:ci - runs ava in ci mode (generates coverage data)
• npm run ava:watch - runs ava in watch mode
• npm run coverage - generates coverage data
• npm run update-coc - pulls the latest weallbehave code of conduct
• npm run deploy - publishes npm package using np

How does it compare?

This section is a little bit about how awoo compares to other static site generators (even though it isn't really that):

• jekyll: Jekyll is a whole lot different. First off, it provides a whole lot of defaults (such as YAML Front-Matter, the Liquid language, etc) to help you build your static site extremely quickly. It's also massively geared for security, since it runs on GitHub's Pages platform. Stuff like custom plugins isn't even available there (not like that's a bad thing!).
• hugo: Hugo, a bit like Jekyll, has predefined concepts like "pages" and "tags".
• metalsmith: Metalsmith is probably the thing that's most like awoo, and as a matter of fact, its main inspiration. It's also plugin-based, and works with roughly the same concepts. The major difference is that awoo is more up-to-date (I like promises a lot) and that the API is fairly different. Also, it's just not really an active project with an active ecosystem anymore (sadly!).

What dependencies does it have?

• deepmerge - used to handle configuration management
• walk - walks through directories to read them
• trough - handles middleware chains
• debug - used for logging
• to-vfile - converts to vfile, the virtual file format used by awoo
• mkdirp - creates directories when writing to disk
• is-text-path - provides logic to correctly read binary files

If you have any ideas as to how to eliminate a dependency, you're more than welcome to pitch it in a new issue!

Maintainers

• Olivia Hugger <olivia@fastmail.com>

Code of Conduct

This repository operates under the weallbehave Code of Conduct. Its contents can be found in CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

License

GNU AGPLv3 (see LICENSE document)