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Flat file markdown blogging system with filesystem watch and extended markdown support

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# Smallblog

![Go Version](https://img.shields.io/badge/go-latest-brightgreen)
[![Go Report Card](https://goreportcard.com/badge/github.com/Depado/smallblog)](https://goreportcard.com/report/github.com/Depado/smallblog)
[![License](https://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-blue.svg)](https://github.com/Depado/smallblog/blob/master/LICENSE)

A simple self-hosted markdown flat files blog

## What is Smallblog

The main goal of this project is to show how easily you can develop a flat file
blog with markdown as the primary writing language. It's not perfect, it will
never be, some people are already doing great things based on that idea, like
[Hugo](https://gohugo.io/) for instance.

## Disclaimer

Smallblog is a quick project. The goal is to take some markdown files with
front matter headers (written in yaml), parse them, render them and store the
resulting HTML in memory. Which means, the more markdown files you have, the
more memory smallblog will consume. It can also generate a static website, but
that's not as fun.

## Features

- Filesystem monitoring: Create, modify or delete a file and your blog is
  updated
- Automatic syntax highlighting using [bfchroma](https://github.com/Depado/bfchroma)
  (which uses [chroma](https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma) under the hood)
- Supports [admonitions](https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/admonition/)
  using [bfadmonition](https://github.com/Depado/bfadmonition)
- No CGO dependencies
- Tag system
- Simple and customizable template and CSS for easy reading
- Comments using [gitalk](https://github.com/gitalk/gitalk)
- Supports global assets for all your articles
- Can generate a static site:
  - Tags won't work
  - Raw markdown won't work

## Tutorial

First of all you'll need a `pages` directory where you'll store all your
articles, so let's create that.

```sh
$ mkdir pages
```

Without configuration, smallblog will try to find a `pages/` directory in your
current working directory. So let's create your very first article, and for that
we'll be using the `new` command :

```sh
$ mkdir pages
$ smallblog new first-article --title "My very first Smallblog article" --draft
INFO[0000] Successfully generated new article            file=pages/first-article.md
```

This commands takes a single argument : The name of the file this command will
write. It will automatically append the `.md` suffix if you don't specify it
and will place it in the configured (or default) `pages` directory. Also we're
specifying that this article is a draft. Drafts can be accessed directly using
the slug of the article, or on the `/drafts` endpoint. Alternatively you can
start the server with `blog.draft` set to true, which will list draft articles
on the homepage.

To check if this is working, simply run the following command :

```sh
$ smallblog serve --blog.draft
INFO[0000] Generated files                               files=1 took="201.207µs"
INFO[0000] Starting server                               host=127.0.0.1 port=8080
```

That's it, you successfully generated and served your first article.

## Configure

You can add a `conf.yml` or `conf.json` in your working directory to make your
configuration persistent. You may have noticed the warning about the
configuration file that wasn't found earlier. Here is an example `conf.yml`
file :

```yaml
server:
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 8006
  debug: true
analytics:
  enabled: true
  tag: xx-xxxxx-xxx
blog:
  title: Depado's Blog
  description: A simple blog from a developer who does things. Powered by smallblog.
  pages: pages/
  draft: true
  author:
    name: Depado
    github: Depado
    twitter: Depado_
    site: depado.eu
    avatar: /assets/avatar.jpg
gitalk:
  enabled: false
  client_id: xxxx
  client_secret: xxx
  repo: articles
  owner: Depado
  admins: [Depado]
log:
  format: text
  level: info
  line: true
```

Explanations of these fields will follow. Just note that all these values
can be customized using command line flags which have a higher priority than
the configuration file. For example you might want to turn on the `debug` mode
of the server without changing your configuration file. In which case you can
just pass the flag `--server.debug` when starting smallblog.

### server

Server related configuration. Defines on which host/port the server should
listen as well as debug mode.

| Field   | Description                            | Default     |
| ------- | -------------------------------------- | ----------- |
| `host`  | Host on which the server should listen | "127.0.0.1" |
| `port`  | Port on which the server should listen | 8080        |
| `debug` | Enable debug mode for the router       | false       |

The `debug` value is especially useful if you modify the HTML templates of
smallblog since you won't need a restart of the service to see your changes
applied.

### blog

General blog configuration such as the blog title, description, pages directory
and code highlighting style.

| Field         | Description                               | Default   |
| ------------- | ----------------------------------------- | --------- |
| `title`       | Title of your blog                        | -         |
| `description` | Description of your blog                  | -         |
| `pages`       | Directory where your articles are stored  | "pages/"  |
| `code.style`  | Style of the syntax highlighting          | "monokai" |
| `draft`       | Display articles that are marked as draft | false     |

### blog.author

| Field     | Description                    | Default |
| --------- | ------------------------------ | ------- |
| `name`    | Name or username of the author | -       |
| `github`  | Github handle of the author    | -       |
| `twitter` | Twitter handle of the author   | -       |
| `site`    | Website of the author          | -       |

In this section you can customize the global author. If you fill this, smallblog
will know that every article that doesn't have author information was written
by this author. This will also be displayed on the front page (article list).

### analytics

Configuration for Google Analytics. Other types or platforms will be supported
but for now only GA can be enabled.

| Field     | Description                                            | Default |
| --------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | ------- |
| `enabled` | Whether or not the Google Analytics feature is enabled | -       |
| `tag`     | Google Analytics tag to use                            | -       |

### Gitalk

Please see the documentation of [gitalk](https://github.com/gitalk/gitalk) to
see how you can configure gitalk for smallblog.

### Log

| Field    | Description                                                                                                | Default |
| -------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------- |
| `format` | Log format, either "text" or "json"                                                                        | "text"  |
| `level`  | Defines the minimum level of logging that is displayed. One of "debug", "info", "warn", "error" or "fatal" | "info"  |
| `line`   | Show where the log happened in the source code (filename, line number)                                     | false   |

## Write Posts

There is no naming convention for file names. You can name them whatever you
want, it won't change the server's behavior. A post (or page/article) file is
divided in two parts. The first part is yaml data. The second part is the actual
content of your article. The two parts are separated by a blank line.

Here is the list of yaml values you can fill

| Key           | Description                                                                           | Mandatory |
| ------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------- |
| `title`       | The title of your article.                                                            | **Yes**   |
| `date`        | The date of writing/publication of your article.                                      | **Yes**   |
| `description` | The description of your article (sub-title)                                           | No        |
| `banner`      | The description of your article (sub-title)                                           | No        |
| `slug`        | The link you want for your article. If left empty, will be generated from title.      | No        |
| `banner`      | URL of the banner (image at the top level of your article)                            | No        |
| `author`      | An author object (as seen earlier) that overrides the global configured author        | No        |
| `tags`        | A list of tags you want to apply on the article (useless right now, but still pretty) | No        |

If any of the two mandatory values (`date` and `title`) are omitted, the parser
will complain, output a log, and simply ignore the file.
Note that the slug of the post will be automatically generated from the
post's title if it is omitted.

## Example Article

`pages/example-article.md`

```
title: "Example article !"
description: "This article is just an example."
banner: ""
author:
  name: Depado
  twitter: Depado_
  site: depado.eu
  github: Depado
  avatar: "//blog.depa.do/assets/avatar.jpg"
slug: example-article
tags: [go,dev,example,hello]
date: "2018-04-03 13:28:13"
draft: false

# Actual Markdown Content
Notice the blank line right after the `draft` section.
That's how you tell the parser that you are done with yaml format.
```

This article will be parsed, and available at `example.com/post/example-article`.
It will also be listed at `example.com/`.

## Filesystem Monitoring

The directory you define in your `conf.yml` file is constantly watched by the
server. Which means several things :

- If you create a new file, it will be parsed and added to your site.
  (Also if you `mv` a file inside the directory)
- If you modify an existing file, it will be parsed and modified.
- If you delete an existing file, the article will be removed. (Also if you
  `mv` a file out of the directory)

All these changes are instant. Usually a file takes ~250µs to be parsed. When
you restart the server, all the files will be parsed again so they are stored in
RAM (which is really efficient unless you have 250MB of markdown file).

## Docker usage

```sh
$ docker pull ghcr.io/depado/smallblog:2.1.5
$ docker run -p 8080:8080 -v $PWD/pages:/pages ghcr.io/depado/smallblog:2.1.5 serve
```

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