Grola

Grola is a semi static site generator.

Offering flexibility halfway between a static & a responsive site, you can use Grola:

1. As conventional site-gen: render source data into the output HTML, or
2. Halfway to conventional site-gen: compile handlers but have source data fetched during requests

There are three main constructs in Grola:

1. Data, your source data, written in TOML
2. Template, your views, written with tinytemplate for templating
3. Parser, the data-definition deserializing your data & serializing it into the template, currently written in 🦀 Rust 🦀

The source-code of your website (parsers) is also the source-code of Grola, as the parsers are written in Rust, allowing for great flexibility in how your data gets filled into your templates.

Meaning, if you want to make your website with Grola, you need to start by cloning this project and installing Cargo (on its own, or using Rustup).

Parsers for popular generic usages are shown in examples

The parsers & templates together compile into the handlers, meaning if either change, the handlers must be compiled.

# compile the handlers into /rust/src/handlers.rs
make parsers

# recompile the handlers (if changed) and start the dynamic server after reading /config-server.toml
make server+

# just start the dynamic server after reading /config-server.toml (won't work if handlers aren't compiled)
make server

# recompile the handlers (if changed) and generate the output HTML (conventional site-gen) after reading /config-pages.toml
make pages+

# just generate the output HTML after reading /config-pages.toml (won't work if handlers aren't compiled)
make pages

ROADMAP

• split making parsers and making server into two binaries, the first binary just copies the contents of OUT_DIR/templates.rs into a file in src/, the second binary then include!'s src/templates.rs instead
• make build.rs have to invoke every time files in templates/ change
• include TOML route attributes as well as request parameters in the template attributes
• rename parsers to handlers
• allow static generation (every template parsed once and stored as html)
• 'public' folder for media, css and js
• toml strings are parsed as markdown to allow rich-text
• make data-pull relative so that server binary can find data-files based on passed argument flag. after done, make bin/ in root where executables get moved from rust/target/release
• make binary that creates entire grola directory-tree and executes all grola commands (tough)

PREREQUISITES

• TOML syntax
• tinytemplate syntax
• Rust Types and their serialization
• Format of deserialization into Rust types followed by the 'toml' crate