tack

a static site generator

WARNING: THIS PAGE IS WORK IN PROGRESS!

About

Tack is a command-line application that compiles input files in various markup languages into a static website. It is loosely modeled after Bonsai^[1] & Stacey and hopefully is a lot less complex to setup and operate than nanoc. The software is written in C# and a proud Mono application that runs on Mac OS X and probably any other POSIX system.

Installation

Make sure, Mono and Git are installed, and just run make from inside the working copy:

git clone git://github.com/roblillack/tack.git
cd tack && make && sudo make install

By default, tack will be installed to /usr/local—this can be changed by modifying the variable PREFIX at the first line of the Makefile.

Alternatively, you could run tack in-place by calling $DIR/tack (it's a shell script) or linking to it.

Commands

tack (or the full version: tack tack)
Generates the static site in directory $PROJECT/output
tack serve
Generate the site and start a web server listening on port 8080 to directly try it out.
tack help lists all available commands.

Project structure

A tack project basically is structured like this:

content/
Holds a sub-directory for each page. Inside of a page directory at least one metadata or markup file has to be provided.
templates/
Contains all the templates.
public/
Any data that is necessary for the operation of the site shall be put here (.htaccess, style sheets, javascript, favicon, …).
site.yml
Optional site-wide metadata. This file can actually have any name.

Managing content

Any page of your site will have to be in its own directory …

TBD

Creating layouts

TBD

Special Variables

TBD

How it works

Tack differentiates between four types of input files that are processed during the tacking of your site:

Templates:
Metadata:
Markup:
Assets:

TBD

Extending tack

TDB

Software tack is based on

Plumbing together a tool like this in virtually no time would not be possible without an ecosystem of frameworks and libraries that you'll only find in the OSS space. Tack is standing on the shoulders of the following giants:

Mono: Open Source CLR implementation and SDK
Nustache: Mustache compatible template engine for the CLR
.less: C# port of the LESS JavaScript library
MarkdownSharp: Markdown markup language implementation for the CLR
YamlDotNet: A .NET library for YAML.

Footnotes

[1]: Tack should even be downward compatible to older Bonsai versions (up until ~1.3.x). As long as Mustache (instead of Liquid) is used as a template language and LESS (instead of SASS) for style sheets, most Bonsai sites shall be tack-able out-of-the-box.

Proudly made with

tack.