Chop

Very minimal SSG generator based on Liquid-based templates. Written in ~300 lines of spaghetti JavaScript, utilizing the new Bun runtime.

Content

Content is written in CommonMark Markdown. Chop also supports Front Matter, to define variables that can later be used in your post, or in your templates.

Templates

Templates are placed in the templates directory. The templates directory should contain subdirectories for each desired output (in my example I have web, rss, gemini).

The following two files from the subdirectory will be used:

• index.*: the file that will be used for content files that have index as basename. Meant as an index, listing pages/posts. If it doesn't exist, the default.* template will be used.
• default.*: the template that will be used for all other content files.

After building, the assembled files will be put in a dist directory. It also contains a subdirectory for every output.

Global variables

Global variables can be defined in the optional config.yaml file. Variables defined here are available in templates.

I'm working on the ability to use variables in content.

Special variables

These variables have special behavior, if specified:

• site.prefix: if specified in global config, all (relative) URLs (including those in content) will be prefixed with this string.

• path: if specified in the front matter of a post, it will be used to generate the final path. It is relative to the site root (aka the directory the site gets put in). Gets prefixed with site.prefix.

Builtin variables

The following variables are exposed by default:

• path: the path of the final file, relative to the root of the site, includes the site.prefix.
• path_unprefixed: same as path, but without prepending the site.prefix.
• content: the plain CommonMark content.
• content_rendered: the HTML or gemtext rendered variant of the content.

In the case of an index, there is one more variable:

• pages: a variable that contains a list of pages. A page is an object that contains the frontmatter from the corresponding content file and the special variables listed above.

Static files

Chop supports two types of static files:

• Output-dependent static files:
  These are different for each template. The stylesheet, for example. Output-dependent files are placed inside the static folder in the desired output directory (templates/OUTPUT/static).

• Global static files:
  These are the same for every output. Images used in posts, for example. Global files are placed inside the static folder in the base directory.

Images will be scaled down to a maximum resolution and then compressed. CSS and JavaScript are minified.

Renderers

Depending on the extension of the template, your content will be translated either to HTML (.html or .xml), gemtext (.gmi) or kept as-is (everything else).

Example configuration

Here's the folder structure for a simple blog:

~/blog
|- static
   |- images
      |- example.jpg
      |- avatar.png
|- templates
   |- web
      |- static
         |- main.css
      |- index.html
      |- default.html
   |- rss
      |- index.xml
|- config.yaml
|- hello-world.txt
|- index.txt