A Rust Site Engine

A Rust Site Engine, or arse, is static site generator written in Rust. It seeks to provide a simple and flexible base for serving sites using:

• Tera for templates
• pulldown-cmark for CommonMark rendering
• routerify to serve the site
• simplecss for default styling
• rss for generating a full-site RSS feed

Usage

• Run an existing site given the path to its config TOML: arse run config.toml
• Logging verbosity can be increased with -v or -vv, the default level is INFO.
• Create and run a new site from user input: arse new

$ arse new
2021-05-01T17:34:11.155427589+00:00 [INFO] Logging started
2021-05-01T17:34:11.155543182+00:00 [INFO] Generating new site configuration
Please enter a name for the site: 
Example Site
Please enter the site author's name: 
Arthur Writeson
Please enter the base URL for your site:
https://www.example.com
Please enter comma-separated site topics: 
one, two, three
2021-05-01T17:34:26.501980660+00:00 [INFO] Creating site filesystem tree
2021-05-01T17:34:26.504816188+00:00 [INFO] Writing site configuration to disk

Configuration

An example config, as generated, is shown below:

[site]
name = 'Example Site'
author = 'Arthur Writeson'
url = 'https://www.example.com'
template = 'default.tmpl'
topics = [
    'one',
    'two',
    'three',
]

[server]
bind = '0.0.0.0'
port = 9090

[docpaths]
templates = '/home/user/site/templates'
webroot = '/home/user/site/webroot'

Rendering and Styling

A default template, default.tmpl, is provided statically within the binary. To change the Tera template, add your custom template to the templates directory referenced in the [docpaths] configuration section of config.toml. Once the template is in the templates directory, change the templates parameter in the [site] configuration section to reference the template's file name. This template will now be loaded at runtime.

The following elements are available within the Tera context for rendering:

• site, mapping directly to the fields available in the site configuration section
• post, available when serving single-posts from from site/:topic/posts/:post.md
  • Used when serving GET /:topic/posts/:post where :post is the markdown filename minus its extension
• posts, a lexically reverse-sorted list of HTML rendered from markdown in site/:topic/posts/*.md
  • Used when serving GET /:topic

Further Customizations

• bind and port may be set in the [server] section.
• New topics are added as array elements
  • For each new topic, create the necessary paths site/:topic/posts and site/:topic/ext
• Items in [docpaths] are generated as full paths for completeness, however relative paths will work if desired
  • From the example above the user is free to simply use site/templates and site/webroot and move the directory out of /home/user
  • Note that arse new creates the site tree, and all other output files, in the current working directory.
• If gallery is one of the topics requested
  • A simple image slideshow will be generated for /gallery/ext/*.jpg
  • Display will follow the same lexical reverse order as posts.

Path to 1.0

• Dynamic route handling
• Provide meaningful logging of binary activites at appropriate levels
• Context-specific Errors and handling
• Support custom Tera templates
• Support custom bind address and port
• Support favicons
• Support a special gallery topic
• Support RSS feeds
• Support for adding/removing topics

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.

Contact

To discuss features, offer assistance, or get help please join the project's Matrix room.