tomzorz / lastpage

A .net core static website generator

lastpage

Lastpage is a .net core static website generator based on Mustachio which is based on Mustache.

You must have .NET Core 2.1 or higher installed.

Try the pre-built lastpage

You can quickly install and try lastpage from nuget.org using the following commands:

dotnet tool install -g lastpage
mkdir build
mkdir live
lastpage

Note: You may need to open a new command/terminal window the first time you install a tool.

Note 2: Running the code above will yield a crash, as it can't find a few files it's looking for. See more info below. (And a nicer OOBE later.)

You can uninstall the tool using the following command:

dotnet tool uninstall -g lastpage

How does it work?

The main ingredients are as follows:

The skeleton is the... well... the skeleton 😊 of the site, usually containing the html, head and body tags - scripts, styles etc...

Partials are common parts that can be inserted into the skeleton or pages - think menus, or a social share widget..

Pages are what get embedded in the skeleton after being templated - think "index", "news" or "cat gifs 🐱‍👤".

Lastpage uses 4 custom file extensions: .lpc, .lps, .lpl and .lpe.

• .lpc files are actually json files, containing the configuration for the tool - at the moment the tool looks for "lastpage-config.lpc" where it was started
• the .lps file is the skeleton file, actually html inside - this can use partials in it
• the .lpl files are the partials, these can be templated using .json files with the same name (templates will be applied before embedding)
• the .lpe files are the pages, these are going to be .html files after being optionally templated (by a .json file with the same name) and then embedded in the skeleton

There is a demo setup in the demo folder, check it out!

Laspage also has the ability to copy additional files into the build folder after post. You might have various reasons to do this:

• some files other than lastpage use the .lp? extensions and it breaks lastpage
• you have a lot of content that definitely doesn't need templating, so it's faster to skip all the matching logic in lastpage and just bulk copy files

Future features

Nicer OOBE

Maybe add a default template?

Implementing automatic updates based on file changes

This is already seen in some comments in the code, sadly FileSystemWatcher needs some taming before primetime in this, causes too many exceptions that can't really be caught.

Ignore files in config

Add a way to ignore certain .json, .lp? or other files from templating even if lastpage finds a match.