Croissant is a very simple static-file blogging engine, using markdown files as input.
DISCLAIMER
Croissant should be treated as an early alpha. You should also probably not use it.
Croissant is something I've wanted to create for a long time, but never really sat down to do it. I decided to try to make it in a week and see what happens. The resulting code is not something I'm proud of, and there are definitely much better static blogging engines out there, but I decided to upload it anyway and hope for some feedback!
I know the name isn't original (github returns another 100 entries for croissant and at least one of them is a blogging engine). A package named croissant already exists at PyPI, too. But that's the name I came up with when thinking about creating a baked blog engine and ultimately I decided that I liked the name enough --or cared too little to come up with something more original, you decide-- to keep it.
Croissant requires Python 3.
pip3 install regex Markdown PyYAML Unidecode Jinja2
git clone https://github.com/ftsagkris/croissant.git # or fork it first if you wish to change it
cd croissant
Edit config/config.yaml
python3 croissant.py
Every time you run it, croissant checks for updates in the posts, pages and media subdirectories under its source directory. If any changes are detected, croissant will only render what's changed and output the rendered files at the specified output. You can run it either locally and copy the files to your server's webroot, or directly on the server.
I run it directly on a VPS and use a Dropbox folder as the source directory. This way you can add or edit files from anywhere.
You can schedule a cron job to run the script every minute like this:
* * * * * python3 /path/to/croissant/croissant.py
or, even better, use inotifywait to respond to file changes, as they happen. As a reference, here is my script:
#!/bin/sh
DIR_PATH="/home/filippos/Dropbox/blog_source/"
RENDERED_PATH="/home/filippos/croissant/config/"
inotifywait -r -e close_write,moved_to,create -m "${DIR_PATH}" "${RENDERED_PATH}" |
while read -r directory events filename; do
python3 /home/filippos/croissant/croissant.py >> /home/filippos/croissant/logs.txt 2>&1
done
Note that I'm also monitoring the config directory. That's because the easiest way to update all the files generated by croissant, is to just delete the rendered_posts.yaml and rendered_pages.yaml files. However, only do this if your posts explicitly state their published date (as shown below in the post structure section), because if they don't, the dates will be reset.
Post structure:
Post title underlined by three or more equals signs
===================================================
date: 2017-05-04
slug: my-title
link: http://link.to/post
draft: false
Post's main body.
There should be at least one empty line between the post's frontmatter and body.
All meta tags are optional. If you don't provide a custom slug, croissant will make a slug out of your post's title. If you don't provide a date, croissant will use the current date. The other two tags have a default value of False.
Static page structure:
About me
========
slug: about
I'm a blogger!
Again, slug is optional.
Source folder structure:
<specified-src-folder>/
posts/
my-first-post.md
another-post.md
...
pages/
about.md
contact.md
...
media/
screenshot.png
...
IMPORTANT
If you delete a post/page/file from your source folder, the next time croissant runs, it will remove it from your blog. This is not a bug. It's the only good way to be able to delete files while on the go, since croissant is really designed to use a Dropbox folder as its source.
Croissant will output a very basic archive of all your posts under http://specified-url.com/archive and an RSS feed under http://specified-url.com/rss.xml.
You may notice that in the config.yaml file there is a public_drafts option. If you set it to True, croissant will output your drafts under http://specified-url.com/drafts/post-slug. You may not want that. I do, so that I can quickly preview a post before it is rendered in the blog's homepage and RSS feed.
If you set it to False, croissant will create a drafts folder under your source folder and output a preview of your draft there.
If you enable it, you should probably disallow access to the /draft/ directory to all web crawlers in your robots.txt file.