A minimal static Markdown-to-HTML blog generator, written in bash, with a Python hot-reloading dev server. It’s the dumbest thing that could possibly work. It started as a joke, but it actually worked well enough for me to use it for my personal blog, until I got bored and switched to Astro.
See the project on GitHub.
  • Converts Markdown in /posts to static HTML in /output
  • Designed to deploy at Cloudflare
  • Frontmatter is in YAML.
KeyDescriptionRequired?
titlePage titleYes
descriptionThe OpenGraph descriptionYes
datePublication dateNo
subtitlePage subtitleNo
unlistedtrue suppress the index listingNo
Posts are listed in index.html, newest first. Undated posts appear last.

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Prerequisites

To run mkwww.sh:
  • Set config.sh to your values
  • Install Pandoc
  • Have a bash shell with awk, sed, and other other typical GNU tools
  • When deploying at Cloudflare, set "$CF_PAGES" = "true" in the Cloudflare build configuration. This triggers the script to install Pandoc in the build container, and skip the debouncing logic used by the hot reload server.
  • Run mkwww.sh in the root of the repo. It will create an output directory with the generated HTML files.
  • Install a python virtual environment with pip install -r requirements.txt to run the hot reload server. This is optional, but recommended for local development. Or, use direnv to create a virtual environment automatically based on the .envrc file.
  • Run the hot reloading dev server with ./dev-server.py. This will watch for changes in the posts directory and automatically rebuild the HTML files when changes are detected.

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Usage

Run the script in the repo’s root: 
$ ./mkwww.sh
View local output in a browser: ./output/index.html