Smallblog

A simple self-hosted markdown flat files blog

What is Smallblog

The main goal of this project is to show how easily you can develop a flat file blog with markdown as the primary writing language. It's not perfect, it will never be, some people are already doing great things based on that idea, like Hugo for instance.

Disclaimer

Smallblog is a quick project. The goal is to take some markdown files with front matter headers (written in yaml), parse them, render them and store the resulting HTML in memory. Which means, the more markdown files you have, the more memory smallblog will consume. It can also generate a static website, but that's not as fun.

Features

Filesystem monitoring: Create, modify or delete a file and your blog is updated
Automatic syntax highlighting using bfchroma (which uses chroma under the hood)
Supports admonitions using bfadmonition
No CGO dependencies
Tag system
Simple and customizable template and CSS for easy reading
Comments using gitalk
Supports global assets for all your articles
Can generate a static site:
- Tags won't work
- Raw markdown won't work

Tutorial

First of all you'll need a pages directory where you'll store all your articles, so let's create that.

$ mkdir pages

Without configuration, smallblog will try to find a pages/ directory in your current working directory. So let's create your very first article, and for that we'll be using the new command :

$ mkdir pages
$ smallblog new first-article --title "My very first Smallblog article" --draft
INFO[0000] Successfully generated new article            file=pages/first-article.md

This commands takes a single argument : The name of the file this command will write. It will automatically append the .md suffix if you don't specify it and will place it in the configured (or default) pages directory. Also we're specifying that this article is a draft. Drafts can be accessed directly using the slug of the article, or on the /drafts endpoint. Alternatively you can start the server with blog.draft set to true, which will list draft articles on the homepage.

To check if this is working, simply run the following command :

$ smallblog serve --blog.draft                
INFO[0000] Generated files                               files=1 took="201.207µs"
INFO[0000] Starting server                               host=127.0.0.1 port=8080

That's it, you successfully generated and served your first article.

Configure

You can add a conf.yml or conf.json in your working directory to make your configuration persistent. You may have noticed the warning about the configuration file that wasn't found earlier. Here is an example conf.yml file :

server:
  host: 127.0.0.1
  port: 8006
  debug: true
analytics:
  enabled: true
  tag: xx-xxxxx-xxx
blog:
  title: Depado's Blog
  description: A simple blog from a developer who does things. Powered by smallblog.
  pages: pages/
  draft: true
  author:
    name: Depado
    github: Depado
    twitter: Depado_
    site: depado.eu
    avatar: /assets/avatar.jpg
gitalk:
  enabled: false
  client_id: xxxx
  client_secret: xxx
  repo: articles
  owner: Depado
  admins: [Depado]
log:
  format: text
  level: info
  line: true

Explanations of these fields will follow. Just note that all these values can be customized using command line flags which have a higher priority than the configuration file. For example you might want to turn on the debug mode of the server without changing your configuration file. In which case you can just pass the flag --server.debug when starting smallblog.

server

Server related configuration. Defines on which host/port the server should listen as well as debug mode.

Field	Description	Default
`host`	Host on which the server should listen	"127.0.0.1"
`port`	Port on which the server should listen	8080
`debug`	Enable debug mode for the router	false

The debug value is especially useful if you modify the HTML templates of smallblog since you won't need a restart of the service to see your changes applied.

blog

General blog configuration such as the blog title, description, pages directory and code highlighting style.

Field	Description	Default
`title`	Title of your blog	-
`description`	Description of your blog	-
`pages`	Directory where your articles are stored	"pages/"
`code.style`	Style of the syntax highlighting	"monokai"
`draft`	Display articles that are marked as draft	false

blog.author

Field	Description	Default
`name`	Name or username of the author	-
`github`	Github handle of the author	-
`twitter`	Twitter handle of the author	-
`site`	Website of the author	-

In this section you can customize the global author. If you fill this, smallblog will know that every article that doesn't have author information was written by this author. This will also be displayed on the front page (article list).

analytics

Configuration for Google Analytics. Other types or platforms will be supported but for now only GA can be enabled.

Field	Description	Default
`enabled`	Whether or not the Google Analytics feature is enabled	-
`tag`	Google Analytics tag to use	-

Gitalk

Please see the documentation of gitalk to see how you can configure gitalk for smallblog.

Log

Field	Description	Default
`format`	Log format, either "text" or "json"	"text"
`level`	Defines the minimum level of logging that is displayed. One of "debug", "info", "warn", "error" or "fatal"	"info"
`line`	Show where the log happened in the source code (filename, line number)	false

Write Posts

There is no naming convention for file names. You can name them whatever you want, it won't change the server's behavior. A post (or page/article) file is divided in two parts. The first part is yaml data. The second part is the actual content of your article. The two parts are separated by a blank line.

Here is the list of yaml values you can fill

Key	Description	Mandatory
`title`	The title of your article.	Yes
`date`	The date of writing/publication of your article.	Yes
`description`	The description of your article (sub-title)	No
`banner`	The description of your article (sub-title)	No
`slug`	The link you want for your article. If left empty, will be generated from title.	No
`banner`	URL of the banner (image at the top level of your article)	No
`author`	An author object (as seen earlier) that overrides the global configured author	No
`tags`	A list of tags you want to apply on the article (useless right now, but still pretty)	No

If any of the two mandatory values (date and title) are omitted, the parser will complain, output a log, and simply ignore the file. Note that the slug of the post will be automatically generated from the post's title if it is omitted.

Example Article

pages/example-article.md

title: "Example article !"
description: "This article is just an example."
banner: ""
author:
  name: Depado
  twitter: Depado_
  site: depado.eu
  github: Depado
  avatar: "//blog.depa.do/assets/avatar.jpg"
slug: example-article
tags: [go,dev,example,hello]
date: "2018-04-03 13:28:13"
draft: false

# Actual Markdown Content
Notice the blank line right after the `draft` section.
That's how you tell the parser that you are done with yaml format.

This article will be parsed, and available at example.com/post/example-article. It will also be listed at example.com/.

Filesystem Monitoring

The directory you define in your conf.yml file is constantly watched by the server. Which means several things :

If you create a new file, it will be parsed and added to your site. (Also if you mv a file inside the directory)
If you modify an existing file, it will be parsed and modified.
If you delete an existing file, the article will be removed. (Also if you mv a file out of the directory)

All these changes are instant. Usually a file takes ~250µs to be parsed. When you restart the server, all the files will be parsed again so they are stored in RAM (which is really efficient unless you have 250MB of markdown file).

Depado / smallblog