summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/web/tutorials/04-compilers.markdown
blob: cdc8eb0b4685c01bba63af900144abb1922b8457 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
---
title: More on compilers: load, and templates
author: Jasper Van der Jeugt
---

Loading items
-------------

The compiler Monad is a complex beast, but this is nicely hidden for the user of
the Hakyll library.

Suppose that you're generating `index.html` which shows your latest brilliant
blogpost. This requires `posts/foo.markdown` to be generated *before*
`index.html` (so we don't have to generate it twice). But you don't have to care
about any of that: Hakyll will sort this out for you automatically!

Let's see some quick examples. We can load a specific item:

```haskell
load "posts/foo.markdown" :: Compiler (Item String)
```

Or a whole bunch of them:

```haskell
loadAll "posts/*" :: Compiler [Item String]
```

Sometimes you just want the *contents* and not the `Item`:

```haskell
loadBody "posts/foo.markdown" :: Compiler String
```

This is all useful if we want to use Hakyll's templating system.

Templates
---------

### Basic templates

Let's have a look at a simple template:

```html
<h1>$title$</h1>
<div class="info">Posted on $date$</div>
$body$
```

As you can probably guess, template files just contain text and only the `$`
character has special meaning: text between dollar signs ("fields") is replaced
when the template is applied. If you want an actual dollar sign in the output,
use `$$`.

You usually compile the templates from disk using the aptly named
`templateCompiler`:

```haskell
match "templates/*" $ compile templateCompiler
```

Notice the lack of `route` here: this is because we don't need to write the
templates to your `_site` folder, we just want to use them elsewhere.

### Templates: Context

We can easily guess the meaning of `$title$`, `$date$`, and `$body$`, but these
are not hard-coded fields: they belong to a certain [Context]. A `Context`
determines how the fields are interpreted. It's a [Monoid] and therefore very
composable.

[Context]: /reference/Hakyll-Web-Template-Context.html
[Monoid]: http://learnyouahaskell.com/functors-applicative-functors-and-monoids

`field` allows us to create a `Context` for a single field:

```haskell
field :: String -> (Item a -> Compiler String) -> Context a
```

Let's try this out. Note that this is for illustration purposes only: you
shouldn't have to write complicated fields often.  We can implement the `$body$`
field like this:

```haskell
field "body" $ \item -> return (itemBody item) :: Context String
```

And `$title$` like this:

```haskell
titleContext :: Context a
titleContext = field "title" $ \item -> do
    metadata <- getMetadata (itemIdentifier item)
    return $ fromMaybe "No title" $ M.lookup "title" metadata
```

And compose them using the `Monoid` instance:

```haskell
context :: Context String
context = mconcat
    [ titleContext
    , field "body" $ return . itemBody
    ]
```

Obviously, it would be tedious to implement things like `titleContext` over and
over again for different websites and different fields. This is why hakyll
provides `defaultContext`. `defaultContext` is a composed `Context` and allows
you to use:

- `$body$` for the body of the page;
- `$url$` for the destination URL of the page;
- `$path$` for the original filepath of the page;
- `$foo$` where foo is specified in the metadata.

`$date$` is not provided by default, you can see how we add it in the definition
of `postCtx` in `site.hs`:

```haskell
postCtx :: Context String
postCtx =
    dateField "date" "%B %e, %Y" `mappend`
    defaultContext
```

### Loading and applying templates

Now we know about templates, context and how to load arbitrary items. This gives
us enough background information in order to understand you can apply a
template:

```haskell
compile $ do
    tpl <- loadBody "templates/post.html"
    pandocCompiler >>= applyTemplate tpl postCtx
```

Loading and then immediately applying a template is so common there's a
shorthand function:

```haskell
compile $
    pandocCompiler >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/post.html" postCtx
```

## Producing a list of items

At this point, everything in the example site we generated should be clear to
you, except for how we produce the list of posts in `archive.html` and
`index.html`.

However, this really isn't hard and just uses the things we saw before: loading
other items and applying templates.

We can reproduce a list of items in the archive using the following code:

```haskell
compile $ do
    posts   <- recentFirst =<< loadAll "posts/*"
    itemTpl <- loadBody "templates/post-item.html"
    list    <- applyTemplateList itemTpl postCtx posts
    makeItem list
```

`recentFirst` sorts items by date. This relies on the convention that posts are
always named `YYYY-MM-DD-title.extension` in Hakyll -- or that the date must be
present in the metadata.

```haskell
recentFirst :: [Item a] -> Compiler [Item a]
```

After loading and sorting the items, we load a template for the posts.
`applyTemplateList` applies this template to every post and concatenates the
result, which is a simple `String`. After that, we need `makeItem` to wrap the
returned `String` to `Item String`.