# Hakyll
Hakyll is a simple static site generator library in Haskell. It is mostly
inspired by [Jekyll](http://github.com/mojombo/jekyll), but I like to believe
it is simpler. An example site where it is used is
[my personal homepage](http://jaspervdj.be) of which
[the source code](http://jaspervdj.be/snapshot.tar.gz) is available as a
reference.
## Installation
cabal install hakyll
## Configuration
Inspired by [xmonad](http://xmonad.org), a small Haskell program is used as
configuration file. In this file, you give instructions on how the site should
be generated. In the rest of this document, we will examine a small example.
This is our directory layout:
|-- _site
|-- favicon.ico
|-- hakyll.hs
|-- images
| `-- foo.png
|-- templates
| |-- default.html
| `-- sample.html
`-- text.markdown
## Static files
Static files can be rendered using the `static` command. This command ensures
the files will copied when you compile the site.
For convenience reasons, there is also a `staticDirectory` command, which works
recursively.
main = do
static "favicon.ico"
staticDirectory "images"
staticDirectory "css"
## Pages
Pages can be written in html, markdown, LaTeX, and basically anything
pandoc supports. They can also contain metadata, which are always key-value
mappings.
---
author: Jasper Van der Jeugt
title: A sample markdown post
---
# A sample markdown post
This is a sample markdown post. It supports pandoc extensions
like code highlighting. For example:
~~~~{.haskell}
main = putStrLn "Hello World!"
~~~~
Metadata is always placed in the beginning of a file, and is delimited by a
`---` string. The metadata can only contain simple key-value pairs. We can
now read in this page using the `Text.Hakyll.Page.readPage` function. This
will return a `Page`, which is actually just a `Map String ByteString`. In
this example, the map would consist of the following key-value pairs:
- `author`: `Jasper Van der Jeugt`
- `title`: `A sample markdown post`
- `body`: The rest of the file (rendered to html).
- `url`: `text.html` (the original filename was `text.markdown`, the extension
was changed to html).
## Templates
In hakyll, there is a strict separation between pages and templates. Templates,
for example, cannot contain metadata.
$title
by $author
$body
Templates are rendered using the Haskell `Text.Template` library. This means
that in your template, you can use `$identifier`, and it will be replaced by
the value of `identifier`.
With this template we could, for example, render the file we saw in the previous
section. It would go like this:
page <- readPage "text.markdown"
render <- renderPage "templates/sample.html" page
Now, `render` will be a `Page` containing all metadata from `page`, but the
`body` key would be replaced by the substitution. This means we can combine
rendering actions. Given another template `templates/default.html`:
$title
$body
We can now combine the rendering actions:
page <- readPage "text.markdown"
render <- (renderPage "templates/sample.html" page >>=
renderPage "templates/default.html")
Of course, you can't really do anything with the render if you don't write it
to a file somewhere. That's why the function `renderAndWrite` exists:
readPage "text.markdown" >>=
renderPage "templates/sample.html" page >>=
renderAndWrite "templates/default.html"
Now, where will this file be written? In `_site/text.html`, of course! That's
because the page still contains a key called `url`, which the renderAndWrite
function uses to determine the file destination.
## More advanced things
Sometimes, you want to create a `Page` from scratch, without reading from a
file. There are functions to do that for you, and I suggest you read the
documentation of `Text.Hakyll.Page`. As a more advanced example, I will
explain the RSS system I wrote for my website.
|-- generate.hs
|-- posts
| `-- 2009-12-02-a-first-post.markdown
`-- templates
|-- rss.xml
`-- rssitem.xml
Our post contains some metadata:
---
title: A first post
date: December 2, 2009
---
# A first post
A first post describing the technical setup of this blog, for that is
The `templates/rssitem.xml` file is a template for rendering one post to an
rss item:
$title
http://jaspervdj.be/$url
New blogpost: $title
Now a template for rendering the whole rss feed, `templates/rss.xml`:
jaspervdj - a personal blog
http://jaspervdj.be/
Personal blog of jaspervdj
$items
Alright, let's get coding.
-- Find all posts paths.
postPaths <- liftM (L.reverse . L.sort) $ getRecursiveContents "posts"
-- Read and render all posts with the rssitem.xml template
-- Also, only render 5 posts.
pages <- mapM readPage (take 5 postPaths)
items <- mapM (renderPage "templates/rssitem.xml") pages
-- Render the result
renderAndWrite "templates/rss.xml" $ pageFromList [ ("items", concatPages items),
("url", "rss.xml") ]
That's that. Now we have a nice rss feed.