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Sauerkraut

My tool for building websites. See philosophy for details.

Plans

  • do not rewrite mathematics/mathematics.cards.json to index.html
  • file.cards.json should generate file-cards.html
  • Autogenerate index.html?
  • "Daily/", etc. categories?
  • Blog RSS feed and fix tags/categories in dev server
  • later: Linter to always ensure trailing slash for local URLs
  • later: for each page autogenerate: references, backreferences, other meatdata, tags, etc.
  • Some interactive apps should have a "freeze" button. to save output, like from a command line. SSR or render caches this, and anything with side-effects cannot be ran unless unfrozen

Introduction

Philosophy

Sauerkraut is my tool for building websites. It:

  • Avoids using popular meta-frameworks like Next.js and Astro
    • To detatch from JavaScript framework boom-bust cycles
  • Uses libraries that solve general problems with a focused, composable, small solution
    • When libraries are inevitably superseded, replacing them should take minutes
    • For example, when serving minature apps, I use esbuild & "manually" do SSR instead of using a Vite-based framework
    • For example, when serving content, I "AOT" bundle necessary libraries with Rollup and use them within <script type="module"> tags
  • Integrates with popular tools like KaTeX and Mermaid

Usage

In a new directory,

pnpm init
pnpm install sauerkraut
mkdir -p ./content
printf '%s\n' '# Hello, World!' > ./content/index.md
./node_modules/.bin/sauerkraut

Summary

Sauerkraut is a static site generator. Conventionally, it recursively reads input files from content/. Then, it processes each file path and content. Finally, it writes the result path and content to build/.

Content Files

Content files are any files located in the content directory that aren't special files.

Transformations are done by default to file paths in two cases:

  1. If a file ends with .md (or similar) files, it is converted into a .html file.
  • /mathematics.md -> /mathematics.html
  • /index.md -> /index.html
  1. If a file name (excluding file extensions) is the same as the directory name of it's parent directory, then that file is renamed to index.html.
  • /about/about.md -> /about/index.html

This makes it easier to edit files in IDEs (unlike Next.js's page.js).

Supported Formats

The following formats are supported:

JSX

These files are processed with esbuild. Typically, they use Nano JSX.

HTML

These files are automatically given the proper HTML boilerplate.

Markdown

These files are processed with the markdown parser markdown-it.

Markdown files support the following features:

Special File Names

Special files modify behavior and are not processed. They include:

  • *.sk.js

Described further in JavaScript Customization

Ignored files are ignored. They include:

  • _*/
  • *_/
  • .git/
  • .obsidian/
  • node_modules/

Website JavaScript Customization

This file potentially customizes the behavior of the whole website. To be recognized, its name must match /sk.config.js.

It can export:

  • title
  • rootDir
  • contentDir
  • staticDir
  • outputDir
  • transformUri()
  • validateFrontmatter()
  • createHtml()
  • tenHelpers

Page JavaScript Customization

This file potentially customizes the behavior of a single page. To be recognized, its name must match /**/<adjacentPage>.sk.js.

It can export:

  • Meta()
  • Head()
  • GenerateSlugMapping()
  • GenerateTemplateVariables()

Directory Structure

build/

Where output files are written to.

content/

These files are processed and written to the build directory.

static/

These files are copied directly to the build directory without processing.

Older Ideas

Entrypoints. Entrypoints were created to make it easier to approximate tracking dependencies of a page. For example, if /math/theme.cls changed, then probably /math/slides.tex should be regenerated as well. This breaks down too often, as it's not uncommon for files under a particular directory to be unrelated. An alternative to entrypoints was tracking dependencies of a page by parsing the page with either regular expressions or a laguage parser library. This wasn't chosen since it would mean adding regular expressions or traverse functions for each markup language. And, detection would not be posssible with more dynamic markup languages.