rib/README.md

rib

Rib is a static site generator written in Haskell that reuses existing tools (Shake, Lucid and Clay) and is thus non-monolithic. It is nearly done but still a work in progress and will soon be ready for general use.

Example

See ./example (author's actual website in fact) to see how the Rib library can be used to write your own static site generator in a few lines of code which includes the HTML and CSS of the site:

$ cloc --by-file example/Main.hs
[...]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
File                             blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
example/Main.hs                     14              5             86
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(See Rib.Simple if you need further customization.)

With Rib you do not have to deal with less powerful template engines or write raw HTML/CSS by hand. Do everything in Haskell, and concisely at that!

To get the example site up and running run:

cd ./example
../ghcid

This will:

• Drop into a nix-shell with needed Haskell dependencies
• Compile the rib library and example/Main.hs through ghcid
  • Whenever Haskell sources change ghcid reloads them
• Run example/Main.hs:main with serve -w CLI arguments
• This does the following:
  1. Generate ./content into ./content.generated using Shake
  2. Listens for changes to ./content, and re-generate them (the -w argument)
  3. Start a HTTP server serving the ./content.generated directory (the serve part)

Thus, by running that one command you get a production-quality web server serving your statically generated HTML files that automatically get regenerated when the source content changes. What's more, you may change the Haskell sources such as Main.hs and ghcid will recompile and relaunch the whole thing. With rib you get hot reload for free.