webls

This project aims to be a simple and lightweight website generator and an alternative to jekyll, hugo and alike. The project is purely written in lua and will also require lua-filesystem to be installed on your system.

The goal of webls is, to automatically create a hierarchically ordered website, based on the file-structure of the input directory. When webls is executed, it will recursivly scan through the config.content (config.lua) directory and search for all folders, images, archives and markdown files. Those will then be rendered and/or copied to the config.www (config.lua) folder, where as a result, the website is generated. Textfiles will be rendered via lua-markdown into html code and folders are displayed as sidebar entries. Several other modules exist and will generate additional content based on the config.modules(config.lua) you have set.

An example page can be found here: webls-demo that is using the data found in content.

Getting Started

GitHub (Travis)

Create a new repository
Create an empty ./content folder
Drop the desired files and folders into ./content
Generate an access token for Travis
Enable Travis-CI for your new repository
Open the travis repository settings, and add a new variable.
```
Name: GITHUB_TOKEN
Value: «Your token»
```

Add and commit a .travis.yml file to your repository:

language: generic

addons:
  apt:
    update: true
    packages:
      - lua5.2
      - lua-filesystem

script:
  - git clone --recursive https://github.com/shagu/webls.git .webls
  - cp -f .webls-config.lua .webls/config.lua || true
  - rm -r .webls/content
  - cp -r content .webls/content
  - ( cd .webls && ./webls.lua )
  - mv .webls/www public

deploy:
  provider: pages
  skip_cleanup: true
  github_token: $GITHUB_TOKEN
  local-dir: public

Travis should now start automatically and prepare your website. The page should now become available under: https://«yourname».github.io/«repoistory».

GitLab

Create a new repository
Create an empty ./content folder
Drop the desired files and folders into ./content

Add and commit a .gitlab-ci.yml file to your repository:

pages:
  stage: deploy
  image: archlinux/base:latest
  variables:
    GIT_SUBMODULE_STRATEGY: recursive

  before_script:
    - pacman --noconfirm -Syu
    - pacman --noconfirm -S lua lua-filesystem git
    - git clone --recursive https://github.com/shagu/webls.git .webls

  script:
    - cp -f .webls-config.lua .webls/config.lua || true
    - rm -r .webls/content
    - cp -r content .webls/content
    - ( cd .webls && ./webls.lua )
    - mv .webls/www public

  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public

GitLab-CI should now start automatically and prepare your website. The page should now become available under: https://«yourname».gitlab.io/«repoistory».

Manual Setup

Install the dependencies: lua and lua-filesystem
Clone the repository: git clone --recursive https://github.com/shagu/webls.git
Put your files into the content/ directory
Run ./webls.lua
Move the www/ folder to your web root

Customization

To customize a webls website, add and commit a .webls-config.lua file into the root directory of your website repository. The above mentioned ci-configs make sure, the config will be used. The Configuration File includes the following options:

title: The title of the website which is shown on the browser titlebar and on the website itself as header
description:: A brief description of your website, a slogan or whatever. It is displayed next to the title
website:: The full name of the domain that your website runs on. Is not yet in use
cname: The domain of your website. Will create a CNAME file in the output directory. Required for custom domains on github-pages
pagesuffix: When set to true, all generated sidebar links will point to an index.html of the directory. This is useful for local development.
scanpath: The foldername of the input directory, where the content is present.
www: The foldername of the output directory, where the content should be rendered to.
modules:: All available modules that are used to render content in the specified order.
html: all html-files found in the input directory will be added to the content view. (.html, .htm)
markdown: is the core module and converts text and markdown files into html. (.md, .txt)
git: will display a widget with the git-url and a link to the latest download.zip if github or gitlab is detected.
gallery: will add an image-gallery to the page. (.png, .jpg, .jpeg, .webp, .gif)
download: will add a download section to the page. (.tar, .gz, .bz2, .xz, .zip, .rar)
footer: adds a footer to the page.
colors: The colors that are used for the website
accent: The unique color of your website
border: The default border color around all objects, and the top-navigation background
bg-page: The background of the body of the page
bg-content: The background color of the modules generated fields
bg-sidebar: The background color of the sidebar
fg-page: The font color of the body of the page
fg-sidebar: The font color of the sidebar