Simple Build tool

Warning

Probably very buggy, it's very opinionated and not extensible.

A simple build tool that assembles a static site from components, templates, and data. I used it to build v6 of https://enochlau.com

Todo List

Core

• Switch to using a .config file for configuration
• Implement caching based on file hashes to avoid unnecessary rebuilds

Components and Templates

• Improve Template parsing strictness
• Implement type safety-ish warnings for template-data mismatches
• Add CSS scoping in components (waiting for @scope general support)
• Provide warnings for unused and unfound components

Data

• Improve data parsing error handling

Errors/Logging

• Exact file and line in error messages

Perf

• Implement selective component caching to reduce disk reads

Syntax/Parsing

• Improve escaping for special characters ({}, "", etc.) (needed?)

Done

• Proper error handling (removed all unwrap/expect calls)
• Performance optimization with Rayon parallelization (12% faster)
• Strip frontmatter from markdown before rendering
• KaTeX support
• Handle port collisions in dev server
• Resolve dual sources of truth for Markdown frontmatter in blog posts (can't fix without proper Markdown parsing into entries)
• Bi-directional editing: You can now double click on a rendered <markdown> element to edit it, and it's reflected in the source code.
• Implement proper Markdown rendering from .md files -> template entries
• Minify after build with minify_html, minifiy-js, lightningcss
• Multiple errors at once
• Better errs with file and more specific messages
• Fix Markdown element indentation issues
• Fix errors to more accurately reflect the source of the error
• Made it much faster by threadding at page_handler
• Enhance flexibility of Markdown syntax highlighting themes (now uses css)
• Check for circular dependencies
• Implement file watcher and Hot Module Reloading (HMR)
• Enhance logging with color, status, etc.
• Add component
• Implement commands: dev, build, new
• Add support for props and slots in components
• Ignore commented out lines during parsing
• Improve error handling (ongoing process)
• Implement templating system
• Implement component system
• Set up file copying from /public to /dist

Documentation

File structure

src
├── data
│   ├── a.md
│   ├── Posts
│   │   ├── advanced-features.md
│   │   ├── getting-started.md
│   │   └── my-first-post.md
│   └── Posts.data.toml
├── pages
│   └── index.html
├── public
│   ├── assets
│   │   └── image.webp
│   ├── favicon.png
│   └── styles.css
└── templates
    ├── Posts.frame.html
    └── Posts.template.html

To use the above, you would run the following command, where target contains a folder src.

simple <build|dev|new> /path/to/target

Components

To use components in markup, do the following:

<Component />
<!-- for a self closing component -->
<Layout><h1>Hello world</h1></Layout>
<!-- for a component which contains a <slot></slot> -->

If no content inside a slot component is provided, it will use the fallbacks inside the <slot> tags. To access components in folders, use a : to separate them like so:

<Folder:Component />

Props

To pass props to a component, use the following syntax:

<Component prop="value" />

Which will be accessible in the component as ${prop}.

Templating

<!-- e.g. in index.html -->
<-Template{Name} />

Think of this like a for each, where Name will be used to search for src/data/Name.data.toml to populate instances of src/templates/Name.template.html

Below is an example of a template file:

<!-- Posts.template.html -->
<article class="post-card">
  <a href="${link}">
    <h2>${title}</h2>
    <p class="meta">
      <span class="date">${date}</span>
      <span class="author">by ${author}</span>
    </p>
    <p class="description">${description}</p>
  </a>
</article>

Note the ${} items. These are template variables that get populated from your data source.

Using TOML with Frontmatter (Recommended)

The recommended approach is to use TOML to specify which markdown files to include, and extract metadata from YAML frontmatter in those files.

src/data/Posts.data.toml - Specifies which files to include and their order:

# List of markdown files to include as blog posts
files = [
  "my-first-post.md",
  "getting-started.md",
  "advanced-features.md"
]

src/data/Posts/my-first-post.md - Markdown file with YAML frontmatter:

---
title: My First Blog Post
description: Welcome to my new blog!
date: Jan 15 2025
author: John Doe
---

# Your Content Here

Your markdown content...

The frontmatter is automatically stripped before rendering and used to generate the data for templating. The following fields are auto-generated:

• --entry-path: Set to the markdown file path
• --result-path: Set to content/{filename}.html
• link: Set to ./content/{filename}.html

All other frontmatter fields (like title, description, date, author) are available as template variables.

Required fields: Only title is required in the frontmatter.

The <markdown> component

There's also a <markdown> component:

<markdown>
  # Hello world

  <img src="image.webp" alt="alt" />
</markdown>

Will render out to:

<h1>Hello world</h1>
<img src="image.webp" alt="alt" />

Note

You can double click on a rendered markdown element and edit it from the web. The changes will be reflected in the source file. It is a bit flakely with escaped html entities, so try to avoid using those.

Frame Files

When using markdown files with frontmatter as shown above, the program will look for a frame file at src/templates/Posts.frame.html to wrap the rendered content. Inside the frame file, the string ${--content} will be replaced with the rendered markdown content.

The frame file can use any of the frontmatter variables (like ${title}, ${date}, etc.) as well as the special ${--content} variable. This allows you to create a consistent layout for all your blog posts while keeping the content in separate markdown files.

Syntax highlighting

Syntax highlighting is supported. It outputs to codeblocks with the syntect highlighting classes. There's tools to convert vscode themes to .tmTheme(textmate theme) files into the css. I made a web app for the process.

Naming

Components, templates, and data must following CamalCase, not contain spaces, and cannot start with a number. They can contain underscores.