Aya

aya is an extremely fucking fast and (not quite) minimal static site generator written in Go.

It’s named after Aya Shameimaru from Touhou Kaeizuka ~ Phantasmagoria of Flower View.

Features

Zero configuration
Cross-platform (compiles and runs on every target Go supports)
Highly extensible
Works well for blogs, documentation pages and generic static websites
Easy to learn (make layout, write pages, aya build, and done!)

Installation

Requires Go 1.17 or higher.

$ git clone https://git.chaotic.ninja/yakumo.izuru/aya
$ cd aya
$ make
# Alternatively can be installed in your $HOME prefix of choice
# make install

Ideology

Keep your texts in markdown, amber, or html format right in the main directory of your blog or site.
Keep all service files (extensions, layout pages, deployment scripts, etc) in the .aya subdirectory.

Define variables in the header of the content files using YAML

---
title: Aya
description: The fastest static site generator
keywords: ayaya
---

Markdown text goes after a header *separator*

Use placeholders¹ for variables and plugins in your markdown or html files, e.g. { title } or { command arg1 arg2 }. Write extensions in any language you like and put them into the .aya subdirectory.

Everything the extensions print to standard output becomes the value of the placeholder.

Every variable from the content header will be passed via environment variables like title becomes $AYA_TITLE and so on. There are some special variables:

$AYA — path to the aya executable
$AYA_OUTDIR — a path to the directory with generated files
$AYA_FILE — a path to the currently processed markdown file
$AYA_URL — a URL for the currently generated page

Example of RSS/Atom feed generation

Extensions can be written in any language you know (Bash, Python, Lua, JavaScript, Go, even Assembler). Here’s an example of how to scan all markdown blog posts and create RSS items:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Generating RSS feed"

echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>' > $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml
echo '<rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/">' >> $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml
echo '<channel>' >> $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml
for f in ./blog/*/*.md ; do
    d=$($AYA var $f date)
    if [ ! -z $d ] ; then
        timestamp=`gdate --date "$d" +%s`
        url=`$AYA var $f url`
        title=`$AYA var $f title | tr A-Z a-z`
        descr=`$AYA var $f description`
        echo $timestamp "<item><title>$title</title><link>https://technicalmarisa.chaotic.ninja/blog/$url</link>
                <description>$descr</description><pubDate>$(gdate --date @$timestamp -R)</pubDate>
                <guid>https://technicalmarisa.chaotic.ninja/blog/$url</guid></item>"
    fi
done | sort -r -n | cut -d' ' -f2- >> $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml
echo '</channel>' >> $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml
echo '</rss>' >> $AYA_OUTDIR/blog/rss.xml

Hooks

There are two special plugin names that are executed every time the build happens - prehook and posthook. You can define some global action s here like content generation, or additional commands, like LESS to CSS conversion:

#!/bin/sh
lessc < $AYA_OUTDIR/styles.less > $AYA_OUTDIR/styles.css
rm -f $AYA_OUTDIR/styles.css

An alternative method of generating CSS is placing .gcss files for gcss to process.

Command line usage

See aya(1)

Sites using this software

License

The software is distributed under the MIT/X11 license.

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