Housecat is a command-line static site generator, written in C. It should support any POSIX environment.

Installing Housecat is simple. A make && sudo make install should do the trick.

git clone https://github.com/mortie/housecat
cd housecat
make && sudo make install

Housecat's interface is simple; housecat <directory>. It expects the target directory to look somewhat like this:

|-- conf - A configuration file
|
|-- input/ - The input files and folders, where page structure and posts are stored.
|   |-- rss.conf - Optional configuration file for an rss feed
|   |-- 00000-home/
|   |-- |-- rss.conf - The rss configuration can be in any directory to apply only to that directory
|       |-- 00000-helloworld.html
|       |-- 00001-hello2.html
|
|-- theme/ - The directory containing the theme files.
|
|-- plugins/ - The directory containing plugins, if any

See the example directory for an example.

Housecat will create a directory, called public, in the target directory. This directory will contain the compiled HTML files, and should be served by a web server.

Housecat will assume all files in input/ is valid HTML, except for files named rss.conf, and just include them blindly into the generated output. However, most people probably don't want to write directly in HTML; you probably want to write in something like markdown. Housecat doesn't do anything with markdown or similar formats by design, but a simple script will fix that. I'm personally using this script for my own blog, which takes markdown files in raw/, turns them into HTML, and put them in input/ for Housecat to process:

#!/bin/bash

build()
{
	for F in $(ls "$1"); do
		if [ -d "$1/$F" ]; then
			mkdir -p "$2/$F"
			build "$1/$F" "$2/$F"
		else
			if [[ "$F" =~ .*\.md$ ]]; then
				name=$(sed 's/\.md$/.html/' <<< "$F")
				sed -ne '/^#/,$' "$1/$F" | cmark | cat <(sed -e '/^#/Q' "$1/$F") - > "$2/$name"
			else # copy non-markdow files directly (rss.conf)
				cp "$1/$F" "$2/$F"
			fi
		fi
	done
}

build "raw" "input"

housecat .

The MakeHTML file is a sample Makefile that converts markdown in raw/ to html in input/.

cmark is the reference implementation of CommonMark, a standardized flavour of markdown. Using any other implementation of markdown, or any other markup language, is as simple as slightly modifying that script.

Housecat expects a conf file in the directory given as the command-line argument. The format for the configuration options are

key: value

with one pair per line. A key contains only alphanumeric characters and underscores, and the value is the rest of the line after the :, excluding whitespace directly after the : (the value starts at the first nonwhitespace character). If there are multiples of the same key in the configuration file, the final setting takes effect.

The options that are required in conf are:

• title A string, the main title of the site
• logo A boolean (true or false), whether or not the site has a logo
• posts_per_page An integer, the number of posts per page on the index pages
• root a string, the root path of the site in the url. For example, if the site is located at http://example.com/housecat-site, root would be /housecat-site. Use / if the site is directly on your url and not in a subdirectory.

The optional options in conf are:

• rss A boolean (true or false), defaults to false. If this option is true, housecat will generate rss feeds.

• rss_drafts A boolean (true or false), defaults to false. If this option is true, posts that are drafts (posts whose titles start with DRAFT:) will be included in the rss feed.

• rss_fullcontent A boolean (true or false), defaults to true. If this option is true, the RSS <item> tags will use the full content of a post in their <description>, otherwise the RSS <item> tags will use the short descrption found in the RSS configuration section of the post input file.

• url A string, defaults to an empty string. Use this option to specify the site url, including the schema (e.g. https://) so the rss feed can contain real links to the content. Without a url, the links in the rss feeds will just be relative paths from the public/ directory.

• rss_level should be unset, global, section, orsubsection. (defaults to global). This option dictates how fine-grained the rss feed channels should be.

  • With global, all of the site's posts will go into a single channel.

  • With section, the posts directly in input/ will go in their own channel, and every directory that is in input/ will get its own channel. Posts in the subdirectories of the subdirectories (e.g. input/section/subsection1/ and input/section/subsection2) will go into the rss channel of the first section they are in (both of the previous example subdirectories would be aggregated into the input/section channel).

  • With subsection, there will be a channel for every directory. For example, posts in input/ will be in a channel, posts from input/section/ will be in a different channel, and posts from input/section/subsection will be in yet another channel.

  Every post is in exactly one channel.

• use_guid A boolean (true or false), defaults to true. If this option is true, Housecat will generate a guid tag for every item with the guid being a link to the post (if url is set) or the relative path of the post html file.

• use_pubdate A boolean (true or false), defaults to false. If this option is true Housecat will use the current time and current locale settings to generate a pubDate tag for the channels.

• webmaster a string. If set, Housecat will create a webMaster tag for all rss channels. This tag is meant to contain the email of the site's webmaster.

Optionally, Housecat will read rss.conf files from input/ to generate metadata for the rss channels. The options cascade, so having an rss.conf file in a directory will also set the channel options on all subdirectories and subsubdirectories and so on, unless the subdirectory in question has its own rss.conf that takes precedence.

The rss.conf files share the same syntax as conf, with the possible options being:

• title a string, the title of the rss channel

• description a string, a description of the rss channel

• language a string, specifies the language of the rss channel (e.g. en-us)

• editor a string, specifies the email address of the editor responsible for the rss channel

• copyright a string, specifies copyright information for the channel

• img a string, specifies a url to an icon image for the rss channel (note: Housecat does not prepend the url variable for you here)

• ttl a string, specifies the time-to-live for the rss channel (this tells readers how often to update)

Furthermore, there is a pseudo-option category. Setting category adds a category to the rss channel. Unlike other options, every specified category will be included since channels can have multiple categories.

Finally, Housecat will not look deeper than it needs to. If the rss_level is global, then only input/rss.conf matters. If the level is section, only the confs in the top level sections matter.

Housecat allows individual posts to specify rss information. Housecat expects this post information to be contained at the top of the input file, above the title <h1> tags, in a HTML comment. A post with rss information would look like:

<!---author: me!
description: an example post
-->
<h1>Example title</h1>

<p>Hello world</p>

The available options for posts are:

• author a string, the author of the post

• description a string, a description of the post

• date a string, the date the post was made. To be completely conformant with rss standards, dates should follow RFC-822.

Furthermore, posts can have an unlimited number of category settings. Every specified category will be applied to the post.