Quickstart¶

Install blag from PyPI

$ pip install blag

Run blag's quickstart command to create the configuration needed

$ blag quickstart

Create some content

$ mkdir 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 looks of the generated site, create a template directory and put your jinja2 templates here.

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 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 create a 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

Internal Links¶

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>

Templating¶

Custom templates are optional and stored by default in the templates directory. blag will search the templates directory first, and fall back to blag's default built-in templates.

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

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:

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

blag.__init__¶

blag.version¶

blag.blag¶

blag's core methods.

Functions

blag.markdown¶

Markdown Processing.

This module contains the methods responsible for blag's markdown processing.

Functions

Classes

blag.devserver¶

Development Server.

This module provides functionality for blag's development server. It automatically detects changes in certain directories and rebuilds the site if necessary.

Functions

blag.quickstart¶

Helper methods for blag's quickstart command.

Functions