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Manual

Quickstart

Install blag from PyPI

$ pip install blag

Run blag's quickstart command to create the configuration, templates and some initial content.

$ blag quickstart

Create some content

$ edit content/hello-world.md

Generate the website

$ blag build

By default, blag will search for content in content and the output will be generated in build. All markdown files in content will be converted to html, all other files (i.e. static files) will be copied over).

If you want more separation between the static files and the markdown content, you can put all static files into the static directory. Blag will copy them over to the build directory.

If you want to customize the look of the generated site, visit the template directory. It contains jinja2 templates and can be modified as needed.

Those directories can be changed via command line arguments. See

$ blag --help

Manual

Pages and Articles

Internally, blag differentiates between pages and articles. Intuitively, pages are simple pages and articles are blog posts. The decision whether a document is a page or an article is made depending on the presence of the date metadata element: Any document that contains the date metadata element is an article, everything else a page.

This differentiation has consequences:

  • blag uses different templates: page.html and article.html
  • only articles are collected in the Atom feed
  • only articles are aggregated in the tag pages

blag does not enforce a certain directory structure for pages and articles. You can mix and match them freely or structure them in different directories. blag will mirror the structure found in the content directory

content/
    article1.md
    article2.md
    page1.md

results in:

build/
    article1.html
    article2.html
    page1.html

Arbitrary complex structures are possible too:

content/
    posts/
        2020/
            2020-01-01-foo.md
            2020-02-01-foo.md
    pages/
        foo.md
        bar.md

results in:

build/
    posts/
        2020/
            2020-01-01-foo.html
            2020-02-01-foo.html
    pages/
        foo.html
        bar.html

Static Files

Static files can be put into the content directory and will be copied over to the build directory as well. If you want better separation between content and static files, you can use the static directory and put the files there. All files and directories found in the static directory will be copied over to build.

content/
    foo.md
    bar.md
    kitty.jpg

results in:

build/
    foo.html
    bar.html
    kitty.jpg

Alternatively:

content/
    foo.md
    bar.md
static/
    kitty.jpg

results in:

build/
    foo.html
    bar.html
    kitty.jpg

In contrast to most other static blog generators, blag will automatically convert relative markdown links. That means you can link you content using relative markdown links and blag will convert them to html automatically. The advantage is that your content tree in markdown is consistent and self-contained even if you don't generate html from it.

[...]
this is a [link](foo.md) to an internal page foo.

becomes

<p>this is a <a href="foo.html">link</a> to an internal page foo.</p>

def this_is_a(test):
    pass

Templating

Templates are stored by default in the templates directory.

Template Used For Variables
page.html pages (i.e. non-articles) site, content, meta
article.html articles (i.e. blog posts) site, content, meta
index.html landing page of the blog site, archive
archive.html archive page of the blog site, archive
tags.html list of tags site, tags
tag.html archive of Articles with a certain tag site, archive, tag

If you make use of Jinja2's template inheritance, you can of course have more template files in the templates directory.

Variables

  • site: This dictionary contains the site configuration, namely: base_url, title, description and author. Don't confuse the site-title and -description with the title and description of individual pages or articles.

  • content: HTML, converted from markdown.

  • meta: stands for all metadata elements available in the article or page. Please be aware that those are not wrapped in a dictionary, but directly available as variables.

  • archive: A list of [destination path, context] tuples, where the context are the respective variables that would be provided to the individual page or article.

  • tags: List of tags.

  • tag: A tag.

Metadata

blag supports metadata elements in the markdown files. They must come before the content and should be separated from the content with a blank line:

title: foo
date: 2020-02-02
tags: this, is, a, test
description: some subtitle

this is my content.
[...]

blag supports arbitrary metadata in your documents, and you can use them freely in you templates. However, some metadata elements are treated special:

  • date: If a document contains the date element, it is treated as an article, otherwise as a page. Additionally, date elements are expected to be in ISO format (e.g. 1980-05-09 21:58). They are automatically converted into datetime objects with the local timezone attached.

  • tags: Tags are interpreted as a comma separated list. All elements are stripped and converted to lower-case: tags: foo, Foo Bar, BAZ becomes: [foo, foo bar, baz]. Tags in articles are also used to generate the tag-pages, that aggregate all articles per tag.

  • title and description: The title and description are used in the html header and in the atom feed.

Devserver

blag provides a devserver which you can use for local web-development. The devserver provides a simple web server, serving your site in http://localhost:8000 and will automatically rebuild the project when it detects modifications in one of the content, static and templates directories.

$ blag serve