Makesite

A blueprint for a simple static website. Built with Make, Pandoc, and some shell script.

Directory structure

The source directory is structured as follows.

Directory	Description
`Makefile`	The Makefile.
`assets`	Static assets (e.g. CSS, Javascript).
`bin`	Auxiliary scripts.
`build/local`	Preview build.
`build/public`	Deployment build.
`content`	Content (e.g. posts and their static attachments).
`templates`	HTML templates.

Use

Configuration

Customize the following variables in the Makefile, if you want.

Variable	Description
`FROM`	The content directory.
`TO`	The preview build directory.
`WITH`	The static assets directory.
`DEPLOY_DIR`	The deployment build directory.
`DEPLOY_BRANCH`	The deploy branch name. To be checked out in `DEPLOY_DIR`.
`DEPLOY_PREFIX`	The common prefix for deploy artifacts, e.g. `www`.

Initialization

The Makefile expects to be run in a Git repository:

git init

After having set any of the above configuration variables, commit your changes and invoke

make init

to ensure that the repository is correctly initialized.

Workflow

Local (re)build

To build your site locally:

make draft

or just

make

Every time you make a change to the content, issuing make should be sufficient to rebuild only those files that have been affected. Sometimes, though, it’s necessary to rebuild from the ground up:

make clean draft

(Using make -B would rebuild on top of what’s already there, which may not be what you want.)

Local preview

To preview the site on your machine:

make serve

To update the build and preview the site:

make draft serve

To let the server run in the background:

make serve &

If you don’t want to see the log:

make serve 2> server.log &

(If something weird happens, you can inspect server.log.)

Deploy

To build the deployment version:

make final

To commit such version, as it is, to the deployment branch:

make commit

To push changes to the remote deployment branch:

make push

If the local version seems OK and you feel intrepid, you can also deploy the site in one step:

make deploy

which is the same as make final commit push.

Note

The deployment version is always rebuilt from scratch upon make final. If you’re really intrepid, you can build it incrementally:

make final-incrementally

Other operations

To clean the local build without rebuilding:

make clean