Luapress v3(.2) Mon 14 December 2015

Recently static website generators have been gaining lots of attention. Inspired by this I have been working on a new major Luapress version, targetting some of the annoyances I find when building this blog with it. A couple of weeks ago I released v3 and two additional minor versions; this post runs through some of the more exciting features and changes:

Environments

With v2, you could pass in a URL to build against, and manually switch from the default build output directory using --build. v3 removes this option in favour of environments defined in config.lua. For example, this site’s config:

config = {
    -- Default URL (pointing to default build/ output dir)
    url = 'localhost/Pointless Ramblings/build',
    ...
    envs = {
        -- Build against this URL, outputting to production/
        production = {
            url = 'http://pointlessramblings.com',
            build_dir = 'production'
        }
    }
}

Watch

This has been in planning a long time now; running Luapress with --watch will cause it to watch for changes in posts/, pages/ and your template (as of v3.2) and automatically build every time a change is detected. This makes the write -> build -> check feedback loop much, much easier to manage.

Mustache (v3.1)

Luapress now has support for .mustache templates thanks to the Lustache library. The old .lhtml templates remain supported, but since they’re a hack I put together one evening, .mustache now powers the default theme.

Sometimes full Lua capability is useful in templates, so a mix of template types is also allowed. For example - this blog is .mustache powered except header.lhtml & footer.lhtml which handle some logic.

Build Options

While v2 really targeted blogs, v3 brings along full support for static websites without any posts. A page can be defined as the index rather than the standard posts, using config.index_page. In addition to this, the page can be forced to the index where there are posts, using config.force_index_page. The posts will still be generated, but the only index of them will be the archive page.

Another little feature is the ability to attach a page to the top of your index (above any posts), using config.sticky_page.

What’s Next

As with v2, I’ll continue to use v3 to power this blog and a few other sites I maintain. I’m sure I’ll soon find things that can be further improved. If you’ve any feature requests, please create an issue and I’ll see what I can do (or modify yourself, PR’s always welcome!).

I also want to improve the documentation. I recently created a Luapress microsite (powered by Luapress, of course), but there’s definitely room for improvement.