Cobnetic (GitHub)

Cobnetic is a POSIX shell-script based static website generator, which operates on a simple structure of pages and templates. It theoretically supports using any language for templating.

Operation

Pages are files containing a header with variable metadata, followed by content in Markdown format. The Markdown content will first be processed by running it through Discount, after which dtepr is responsible for inserting the page contents into the template. dtepr directives in pages are fully supported, and will be processed prior to the Markdown. The directives in the template will be processed separately in a second pass, as the generated page content is inserted.

See the example folder for a very small example site using a single template, and POSIX shell as the template processor.

Invocation

Invoke cobnetic from a directory containing the site files. With default behaviour, processing rules (environment variables) will be sourced from cobnetic-site.rules in the site root. Any files ending with .md.dte in the pages directory will be processed using templates in the templates directory, and the resulting HTML file will be put in the site output directory.

Default behaviour can be changed by setting one or more of the following environment variables:

• CBN_SITERULES: Path to source the site rules from. (cotnetic-site.rules)
• CBN_OUTPUTPATH: The directory to put the generated site files in. (site)
• CBN_PAGES: Directory containing Markdown pages to process. (pages)
• CBN_TEMPLATES: Directory containing template files. (templates)
• CBN_STATIC: Directory containing static files. If the directory exists, it and its contents will be copied unprocessed to CBN_OUTPUTPATH. (static)
• CBN_EXT: Extension of files to process. (.dte)

Language support

• CBN_PROCESSOR: Name of a shell function that writes a small executable processing program to stdout; this program is responsible for maintaining processing state between different dtepr invocations (so you can keep values in variables throughout the entire page/template). Two such processors are currently included; shell_processor (the default) and python_processor. They can be used with your shell and with Python as the templating language, respectively.

Dependencies

• dtepr
• Discount
• Python

(Python is currently required for creating the sender that communicates with the dtepr processor.)