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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago I asked myself the same question. Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on. Surprisingly enough I couldn't find anything that does that so I ended up building one myself. Doesn't support syntax highlighting at the moment but I've considered looking into it. Perhaps I should open source it and see if someone wants to give a hand, who knows...

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Pelican [1] works this way, and I love it for my blog/website.

I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

[1] https://blog.getpelican.com/

Um... No, it doesn't.

> I write a post in markdown, commit and run a pelican-provided script that uploads the generated site to the hosting server. The script-running could be done with a hook.

This is exactly what I don't want to deal with. Sure, I could use a ci service but this is a typical case of over-engineering a simple problem.

I use Pelican with hosting on Netlify.

On my end I write a new markdown post and push it to Github.

At that point Netlify takes over to rebuild and redeploy my site including the new post. It's pretty trivial to do.

https://github.com/jacquescorbytuech/Blog

https://www.jacquescorbytuech.com/

Trivial? Totally. Self-contained? Absolutely no.

Say Microsoft decides to kill github pages. OK, fine, next.

Now picture Netlify changing some policy, adding some pricing or killing off a service which you need(unlikely but not entirely impossible). You have to setup the whole thing all over again with someone else, be it circleci, jenkins, gitlab, etc. Though in different contexts, I've been in similar situations and by the third time I usually want to murder someone.

You're overestimating Netlify's build tooling. It literally just spins up a virtual machine with Node on it, clones your repo, and does an `npm install && npm build`. When that finishes it copies the output directory to a server to host. Moving to a different host is a case of finding something that will let you do the `npm install && npm build` bit, which practically every modern hosting company does these days. Netlify's automated builds aren't even close to the complexity of running a CI process.

If you wanted to you could run the build process locally and commit the output HTML and CSS files to the repo, and the build process wouldn't even be necessary. You'd just need to copy the output files to a server using a git commit hook.

Which brings us back to my original question: Why????? Why bother doing all that and relying on third party tooling, regardless of how simple it is to run a command? If this is what I wanted, I could write a 5 line shell script on a raspberry pi which can do just that.

I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.

The reason I have things set up to deploy from github to Netlify is mainly because I'm not the only contributor to things I work on. As soon as you work in a team it's far simpler to have a central service that people push to doing the builds, especially if you don't want contributors to have access to the host server.

I'm not questioning the scenario where you have multiple contributors. This is one of the major reasons why the concept of ci/cd exists.

The topic of the thread is __specifically__ personal blogs/pages and my point is as strong as ever: having to deal with builds, cis, for your personal page is pure bs.

> I DON'T want to do either of that. Add a file, push it and know everything has worked.

That's precisely what Netlify offers you.

Netlify simply adds an abstraction layer over a task which I don't want to be performed __AT_ALL__. I don't care if I'm doing it myself or someone else is on a server somewhere on my behalf. It is utterly stupid to have all that to serve a static file.

So ... just serve your markdown repo using Caddy.

https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown

”Caddy is both a flexible, efficient static file server and a powerful, scalable reverse proxy. Use it to serve your static site with compression, template evaluation, Markdown rendering, and more.”

https://caddyserver.com/

Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:

https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...

So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.. what do you want from the world haha

Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?

> So write HTML and push that directly to your webserver.

A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.

> Forgive me for suggesting the first thing that popped into mind, could you run the generator script locally and also push the /public dir which your server then serves directly?

Same as CI - adds an extra step to the process. But as I said, services like Netlify come and go and the news might slip by you and catch you off guard. If I had to go down that road, I have ~10 raspberry pi's 6 of which are currently booted up. A 5 line shell script could easily do that. But again - I see no point in doing it if there's no need for it.

> A much better option. Still have to deal with the de-facto boilerplate of every html file: head, body, header, footer. Which is why I built something that does it in the browser for me.

I find it fascinating that you'd go to all the trouble to build what essentially breaks down to a custom static site generator but you then balk at using an off the shelf one with a build script.

The difference is that ci-type of solutions might end up requiring maintenance for a million and one reasons. This won't and building it took me roughly the same amount of time it would take me to navigate through a ci-solution and test that I've set it up correctly(3 hours in total).

Something must turn the .md into HTML, and something must also publish it. You end up with 2 choices: the above one, or sth like GitLab pages, where you need to provide a CI script but then can just commit & push.

Yep, you're right, something must turn the markdown into an html. In my case, I let the browser do that and by doing so, I avoid the hassle around builds, cis which is what I didn't want to deal with. For something so brutally simple anyway.

Posted this deeper in thread, also noting up here:

Just serve your markdown git repo using Caddy.

https://caddyserver.com/docs/markdown

https://caddyserver.com/

Here’s a blog on doing this with the older version of Caddy:

https://blog.thomaspuppe.de/static-sites-from-markdown-with-...

You get a lot of other “just works” goodness too.

FYI our v1 site went away this week (we've had redirects for about 7 months now). Here's the link to the v2 docs for markdown rendering with templates: https://caddyserver.com/docs/modules/http.handlers.templates...

Redirects may have been wrong form? This was top link in Google and DDG for ‘caddy markdown’... but to your point, it didn’t respond. So I figured right page based off of the snippet and visited status. Right form of redirect should update the index, no longer show the old page.

https://github.com/kittykatattack/thepoetrybook

Did something like that years and years ago as a learning project. Works great! Drop in some markdown and you’re done. The source is only a few hundred lines; no build or package manager.

So you're talking about a static site generator implemented in javascript in the browser? I don't see why it wouldn't work as long as the webserver supported directory listings, but it would obviously completely break for clients not using javascript.

The simplest solution I've used is to just have a Makefile that indexes and stitches together pages using cat/sed/ls. Sure, you have to run make (and possibly make upload if you're not doing it live), but it's not so bad.

Essentially yes, this is what my personal site is currently running(though it is empty as it stands, largely due to time constraints). Except I wrote it in Dart because I abhor javascript with a passion, even if the final output is still javascript.

Yeah, I also am guilty of liking to write static site generators more than liking to actually write something!

> Ideally I wanted not so much a generator but rather something that is completely self-contained. Essentially add a markdown or html file, commit and move on.

Could you explain what you mean here?

As I said, make it fully self-contained without relying on "builds" or any other mumbo-jumbo, the way you would with sphinx or hugo or whatever. Essentially add a new html or markdown file, put whatever you want in it, let's call it "something.md". Then add a link from your index page to "#/something.md" and not deal with builds or styling or whatever, simply commit and move on and have it take care of all the html. And in the case of markdown, parse it and render it as html on the client.

Does Algernon fit the bill? https://github.com/xyproto/algernon

Quoting their README:

Web server with built-in support for QUIC, HTTP/2, Lua, Markdown, Pongo2, HyperApp, Amber, Sass(SCSS), GCSS, JSX, BoltDB (built-in, stores the database in a file, like SQLite), Redis, PostgreSQL, MariaDB/MySQL, rate limiting, graceful shutdown, plugins, users and permissions.

All in one small self-contained executable.

I searched for something similar. Considered Caddy and Nginx/Apache with markdown plugins, but wanted to be able to create and edit pages/files and made a small script with Flask instead.

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