blogctl

README

blogctl

Overview

blogctl is a streamlined system for publishing a photo blog as a static site (on s3 or similar). The primary UI is the blogctl commandline utility.

It's what I use to make charczuk.com.

Installation

• Make sure you have golang installed
  • see: Golang Installation Instructions for more detail.
• From a commandline, run:

  > go get go.charczuk.com/projects/blogctl
  

You should now be able to create a blog and publish it.

Blog Structure

There are a couple main things that are required to build a blog with blogctl.

These are contained within the blog's config.yml (found at the root of the blog, a file in YAML encoding):

• outputPath Where the blog will be built (defaults to ./dist)
• postsPath Where blogctl reads posts (defaults to ./posts). Posts should be in their own folder and appear in the order in the blog they appear on disk.
  • A post consists of:
    • The image file (must be a .jpg).
    • meta.yml Where you can specify things like the posted date, the title, the location, commands and tags.
• postTemplate Where the html template for each post lives (defaults to layout/post.html)
• tagTemplate Where the html template for each tag's posts lives (defaults to layout/tag.html)
• pagesPath A path to a directory of pages to render (defaults to layout/pages). Typically includes index.html, or the root page.
• partialsPath A path to a directory of partials to include when rendering pages or the post or tag template.
• staticPath A path to a directory of static files to copy as is to the outputPath. Typically stuff like javascript and css files and other image assets.
• s3 Options for deploying to s3 like the bucket and the region.
• cloudfront Options for caching with cloudfront, includes options like the distribution.

There are some extra paths that

blogctl usage

With blogctl you can initialize a new blog, create a new post, compile the blog to the output directory, and publish it to s3.

It reads from config.yml and then files on disk.

Main Commands:

• blogctl init Creates a new blog from scratch with a functioning gallery and (1) sample post, and creates a config.yml for you.
• blogctl new Creates a new post from a given file (must be run in your blog's directory).
• blogctl build Compiles posts found in your postsPath

See: blogctl --help for more info.

Other stuff

blogctl uses golang's great html/template package to generate the site. More docs on html/template can be found here