Chloe

A simple, composable static site generator for Clojurists.

Usage

chloe is in the very early stages right now and documentation / examples are sparse—this will improve soon!

Chloe consists of a lean set of sharp functions that make building static sites in Clojure a joy. Here are some common ways to build sites with Chloe.

Structure

Websites map very nicely to directory structures, so let's create one that represents your site.

Here's a sample layout:

resources/
  partials/
    post/
      chloe-is-awesome.md
      chloe-is-cool.md
  public/
    main.css
    images/
      chloe-architecture.jpg
src/
  my-site/
    page/
      about.clj
      index.clj
    core.clj
    layouts.clj

In this layout, partial content (simple text-focused content that will likely be transformed, laid out, etc. like markdown blog posts for example) is placed in resources/partials and assets (stuff that will be reflected exactly over to your site without any intermediate transforms) are placed in resources/public.

Notice how this structure is exactly the same as a standard Clojure project. That means you can work on your website using all the Clojure tooling that you know and love, like Leiningen.

Build

Now, let's tap into Chloe to build your site:

(ns my-site.core
  (:require [chloe.core :as chloe]
            [chloe.plugin.frontmatter :refer :all]
            [chloe.plugin.drafts :refer :all]
            [chloe.plugin.markdown :refer :all]
            [chloe.plugin.pretty-urls :refer :all]
            [chloe.plugin.pages :refer :all]
            [chloe.plugin.layout :refer :all])
  (:require [my-site.page.index :as index]
            [my-site.page.about :as about]
            [my-site.layouts :as layouts]))

(defn build []
  (->> (chloe/content "resources/partials")
       (merge (chloe/assets "resources/public"))
       (frontmatter)
       (remove-drafts)
       (markdown)
       (prettify-urls)
       (add-pages {"/" index/render
                   "/about/" about/render})
       (layout {"/post/.*" layouts/post
                ".*" layouts/default})))

As you can see, building your site is as simple as threading together Chloe functions that transform your site's content.

Export

When you want to export your site, just use chloe/export:

(defn export []
  (->> (build)
       (chloe/export "out")))

Develop Live

For live development, you can set up a Ring handler by passing your build function to chloe/ring-serve:

(def dev (chloe/ring-serve build))

Examples

The following sites are built with Chloe:

• preetam.io

Prior Art

Thanks to:

• Metalsmith for the insight that static site generators are simply a sequence of pluggable transformations applied to site content
• Stasis for the observation that coding in Clojure is more fun than learning and editing framework-specific configuration
• perun for early inspiration on mapping Metalsmith's design to Clojure

License

Copyright © 2019 Preetam J. D'Souza

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License either version 1.0 or (at your option) any later version.