Cyberpunk websites for the modern web.
There was a time before React, before Wordpress, and before even javascript and php. And the webmasters who ran the 'net back then made do with what they had. They wrangled their webservers to the fullest and they hacked together sites that could do what they need-- somehow.
The web has grown up a lot since then, but unfortunately many of the modern tools we've built on top of are just way too complicated to maintain on the day-to-day without a fully staffed corporate webdev team.
The goal of Arise is to take the lessons of yesteryear and make something novel. Arise is a cloud-native static site generator written in Bash, designed to be a fusion of ultra-stable timeless 90s technology and modern DevOps paradigms. Arise is designed around use cases like individual blogs and personal websites.
Arise is written in Bash with very few dependencies outside of the standard GNU toolchain. Arise is designed with longterm simplicity and maintainability in mind. It is unlikely that the core code Arise runs on will break in the near future due to language or dependency updates.
Arise supports modern SEO features that are built into your pages out of the box without any extra effort necessary:
- OpenGraph and TwitterCard support for rich embed details
- Dynamically generated RSS feed
- Dynamically generated search engine sitemap
Arise is built to be practical and let you build a website that actually has real content on it and isn't just a single-page placeholder. Arise uses a modular page architecture with support for dynamically generated metadata-rich index pages to keep your site hierarchy traversable by end users.
A live demo of Arise can be found at https://ari.se.net
The example site is actually deployed straight from this repository, so the contents you see there are exactly what you get if you were to fork this exact repo and host it yourself.
All of the documentation for getting started with Arise can be found within this repository.
- Bash 5.1
- Used for: 😐
- Why: Do you see what language this program is written in?
- pandoc
- Used for:
build_page- Function that builds pages from a.mdsource file - Why: Arise uses Pandoc for conversion of Markdown to HTML. If your source pages are already in HTML and you don't need Markdown conversion, you can disable Markdown conversion on individual pages with the use of an Arise page option (see above).
- Used for:
- GNU
date- Used for:
build_rss- RSS feed generator function - Why: You see, RSS is kind of ridiculous because it asks for dates in RFC-822 (stupid) rather than the usual ISO 8601 format used by developers who weren't dropped on their head as a child. GNU's implementation of the date command has a flag to accomodate this, but it's not available on BSD/macOS.
- Used for:
- GNU
find- Used for:
build_toc- Function that builds TOC/index pages - Why: Only the GNU version supports
-maxdepth. This flag is used for the TOC indexer function to ensure that only folders in the current directory (and not subfolders of those) get put into your indices.
- Used for:
- GNU
awk- Used for:
evaluate_inline- Function that performs inline bash snippet evaluations. This is disabled by default because this functionality is still WIP. - Why: Using
awkin any capacity is the equivalent of staring into a horrific eldrich abyss not meant for mere mortals. Making those commands portable is another story entirely.
- Used for:
- GNU
sed- Used for:
build_header- Function that populates headers with metadata from page source files Dependency for the header metadata tag population. - Why: This script makes use of the GNU version of the '-i' flag. BSD sed will not let you run inline sed replacements without forcing you to do an extra file write to create a backup of the original file, which you then have to run ANOTHER command to delete (literally why).
- Used for:
- Refactor inline bash evaluation function and enable its usage. Right now it only works on very tiny/simple snippets because I wrote the logic for it because I thought it would be funny to implement (it was). I wasn't thinking of it in terms of a feature that is actually functional and practical to use, but I'd like to do that now.
- Allow inline bash evaluations in the site headers and footers
- Add support for metadata tag usage in the site footer.
- Move the hardcoded TOC formatting in
build_tocinto a configurable template within.config - Bundle and implement Markdown.pl as a fallback rendering engine for systems that do not have pandoc installed.
- Add support for inline include statements for html snippets saved in the
/configfolder so that it's possible to write reusable little bits for pages. - Implement better error handling. Right now it's wishy washy and in many ways basically nonexistent-- most stuff will silently error or otherwise not gracefully cause an abort.
- As far as dependency checks, right now it only checks if your bash version is good. Maybe could consider implementing checks for the other dependencies. It's really hard to determine if something is GNU or not, though.
All the legal bulldrek relevant to this repository can be found here.
A summary* of the license terms (which is not a substitute for the above-linked licensing information itself) is:
- The example site is MIT License
- TL;DR: You can edit and do whatever with it. Go crazy, choom. You can license your own website built off my example however you damn please.
- The logo is Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0
- TL;DR: You can do what you want with it as long as you let anyone else do the same with any derivatives you redistribute.
- All the Arise code itself is AGPL 3.0
- TL;DR: You have to give people a copy of your version of the source code if you modify and/or redistribute it in any way when you use it to create and deploy your website.
- If you don't modify the Arise software code itself and don't redistribute it, you don't need to host the source code for other people. But, to be clear, removing the link to this repository from the help function constitutes as modification as far as AGPL is concerned.
- AGPL scares a lot of people. I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but check out this cool article about AGPL and maybe it will make it a little less scary for you :)
*This summary highlights only some of the key features and terms of the actual license. It is not a license and has no legal value. You should carefully review all of the terms and conditions of the actual license before using the licensed material. Also, I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice.
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