This is not ‘good’ software. You are free to use it, but please bear in mind it’s a janky personal project. It might not work the way you want it to. It might not work at all.

Keelback is a flat-file static site builder written in Python. It’s designed to make categorising and maintaining the source content straightforward, while keeping a wiki-like (non-hierarchic) link structure.

Content is stored in txt files and rendered using Markdown, with templates written in html and rendered with Pystache. Static objects like stylesheets and images are not modified.

After cloning the repo, create a virtual environment and activate it:

$ python3 -m venv .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate

Install the requirements:

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

The config.json file contains a few configurable settings, like the content and export directories. When you’ve made the desired changes, run Keelback:

$ python3 keelback.py

(If the export folder doesn’t exist, you may need to create it first. Please note that anything in this folder will be overwritten.)

Pages can be categorised by arranging them in folders within the content directory. On export, the hierarchy is flattened and category pages are generated automatically for each folder. If a txt file exists with the same name as a category, it will overwrite the auto-generated category page.

The following content structure:

Content/
  ├─ index.txt
  ├─ 404.txt
  │  ...
  └─ recipes/
       ├─ risotto.txt
       └─ tortellini.txt
          ...

will be exported as:

Export/
  ├─ index.html
  ├─ 404.html
  ├─ recipes.html
  ├─ risotto.html
  └─ tortellini.html
     ...

with the file recipes.html generated automatically, containing a linked list of every html file in the ‘recipes’ category.

Pages can optionally include metadata, in the form of key-value pairs (one per line), separated from the main content by a delimiter (===== by default).

Title: Example Blog Post
Date: 01-09-2021
=====
...

Only title and date are used by Keelback: title overrides the page’s filename (since the latter must also work as a URL slug), and date is used to sort time-based content like blog posts.

Pages are rendered using Pystache, a Python implementation of the Mustache logicless template system. This can also be used within page content to access other page and category objects within the site:

• pages.<slug>.link returns a link to the specified page, with the page’s title attribute as the link text.

• pages.<slug>.meta.<property> returns arbitrary metadata for the specified page (as described above).

• categories.<name>.contents returns an html list of all pages in the specified category. If every page in the category has a date attribute, this list is an ol in reverse chronological order; otherwise it’s an alphabetically sorted ul.