aya

aya is an extremely minimal static site generator written in Go.

Named after Aya Shameimaru from Touhou 9.5: Shoot the Bullet

Features

• Zero configuration (no configuration file needed)
• Cross-platform
• Highly extensible
• Works well for blogs and generic static websites (landing pages etc)
• Easy to learn (you literally don't need to)
• Fast (goes without saying)

Installation

Build it manually provided you have Go (>=1.17) installed:

    $ go install marisa.chaotic.ninja/aya/cmd/aya@latest (1)
    --- or ---
    $ git clone https://git.chaotic.ninja/yakumo_izuru/aya
    $ cd aya
    $ make
    # make install

(1) If you use this method, the aya version subcommand may print the wrong string, but it should not be a problem unless you use it on a page.

You can also disable certain features at build time, with the -tags switch. Currently, these tags are available: noamber, nogcss. See go help buildconstraint for more details.

Ideology

Keep your texts in markdown, amber, or html format right in the main directory of your blog/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: My web site
keywords: best website, hello, world
---

Markdown text goes after a header *separator*

Use placeholders 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 subdiretory.

Everything the extensions prints to stdout 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 - a 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 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>http://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 actions here like content generation, or additional commands, like LESS to CSS conversion

Note, you can also place .gcss files for gcss to process instead

Command line usage

Read aya(1)

License

The software is distributed under the MIT/X11 license.

Sites using Aya!

(I know, I made the majority of them, but they still count)

Ayaya~