fixie

A one gear static site generator

This project parses Markdown files in the current directory and converts them to HTML. I use it to generate the pages for my personal blog.

The idea is very similar to what Jekyll and Hugo do: generate HTML from Markdown files. But fixie is hard-coded to my needs and allows for (almost) no customizations. Hence the name: fixie.

Getting started

You can download the fixie executable from https://github.com/hectorcorrea/fixie/releases or via the command line with cURL:

$ curl -LO https://github.com/hectorcorrea/fixie/releases/latest/download/fixie
$ chmod u+x fixie

Once fixie is on your machine, make sure you have some Markdown files to process (and optionally a layout.html). Below are the steps to create to sample Markdown files:

$ echo "# Hello World" > index.md
$ echo "This is the home page" >> index.md
$ echo "and it links to the [About](about) page" >> index.md

$ echo "# About page" > about.md
$ echo "This is the about page" >> about.md

$ ls
about.md
index.md

Now let's run fixie to process these Markdown files:

$ ./fixie
fixie - a one gear static site generator

No layout file (./layout.html) was found
Processing .md files...
  about.md
  index.md
No blog entries (./blog/) were found

Notice how it reports that processed about.md and index.md. If you list your files again you should notice now the newly generated about.html and index.html files.

$ ls
about.md
about.html # Generated by fixie
index.md
index.html # Generated by fixie

At this point you can also preview your site by running ./fixie -server and pointing your browser to http://localhost:9001

You might have noticed that fixie reported that no layout.html file was found. If we create one with the following content (notice that this is an HTML file with the special {{CONTENT}} token)

$ echo "<header>This is the header</header>" > layout.html
$ echo "<div>{{CONTENT}}</div>" >> layout.html
$ echo "<footer>This is the footer</footer>" >> layout.html

and rerun ./fixie -server you'll see the header and footer in both pages (index.html and about.html)

Likewise, you might have noticed that when we ran ./fixie it reported that "No blog entries (./blog/) were found". This is because in our example we don't have a ./blog folder with Markdown files, but if you create one you should see how those files are also processed and recognized as blog entries.

More information

Check out this blog post: https://hectorcorrea.com/blog/2023-10-18/fixie

Build from source

The code is written in Go and you'll need to have Go installed on your machine to build it.

git clone https://github.com/hectorcorrea/fixie
cd fixie
go build

Once you have the executable you can test it with the sample site provided in the repo. To process the Markdown files in the sample site run:

cd sample
../fixie

...and after that you can run ../fixie -server to stand up a local server and browse to http://localhost:9001 to see the generated site.