Scott Hanselman

It's a bit of a renaissance out there when it comes to Static Site Generators. There's Jekyll and GitBook, Hugo and Hexo. Middleman and Pelican, Brunch and Octopress. There's dozens, if not hundreds of static site content generators, and "long tail is long."

Static Generators a nice for sites that DO get updated with dynamic content, but just not updated every few minutes. That means a Static Site Generator can be great for documentation, blogs, your brochure-ware home page, product catalogs, resumes, and lots more. Why install WordPress when you don't need to hit a database or generate HTML on every page view? Why not generate your site only when it changes?

I recently heard about a .NET Core-based open source generator called Wyam and wanted to check it out.

Wyam is a simple to use, highly modular, and extremely configurable static content generator that can be used to generate web sites, produce documentation, create ebooks, and much more.

Wyam is a module system with a pipeline that you can configure and chain processes together however you like. You can generate HTML from Markdown, from Razor, even XSLT2 - anything you like, really. Wyam also integrates nicely into your continuous build systems like Cake and others, so you can also get the Nuget Tools package for Wyam.

There's a few ways to get Wyam but I downloaded the setup.exe from GitHub Releases. You can also just get a ZIP and download it to any folder. When I ran the setup.exe it flashed (I didn't see a dialog, but it's beta so I'll chalk it up to that) and it installed to C:\Users\scott\AppData\Local\Wyam with what looked like the Squirrel installer from GitHub and Paul Betts.

Wyam has a number of nice features that .NET Folks will find useful.

• Written in .NET and easily extensible
• Low ceremony - download a zip file, unzip, and run
• Flexible script-based configuration using the power of the .NET Compiler Platform (Roslyn)
• Lots of modules for things like reading and writing files, handling front matter, and manipulating metadata
• YAML parser, Less CSS compiler, Image manipulation
• Support for multiple templating languages including Markdown and Razor
• Integrated web server for previewing output
• Integrated file watching and regeneration
• Embeddable engine

Let's see what I can do with http://wyam.io in just a few minutes!

Scaffolding a Blog

Wyam has a similar command line syntax as dotnet.exe and it uses "recipes" so I can say --recipe Blog and I'll get:

C:\Users\scott\Desktop\wyamtest>wyam new --recipe Blog
Wyam version 0.14.1-beta

   ,@@@@@       /@\        @@@@@
   @@@@@@      @@@@@|     $@@@@@h
  $@@@@@     ,@@@@@@@    g@@@@@P
 ]@@@@@M    g@@@@@@@    g@@@@@P
 $@@@@@    @@@@@@@@@   g@@@@@P
j@@@@@   g@@@@@@@@@p ,@@@@@@@
$@@@@@g@@@@@@@@B@@@@@@@@@@@P
`$@@@@@@@@@@@`  ]@@@@@@@@@`
  $@@@@@@@P`     ?$@@@@@P
    `^``           *P*`
**NEW**
Scaffold directory C:/Users/scott/Desktop/wyamtest/input does not exist and will be created
Installing NuGet packages
    NuGet packages installed in 101813 ms
Recursively loading assemblies
    Assemblies loaded in 2349 ms
Cataloging classes
    Classes cataloged in 277 ms

One could imagine recipes for product catalogs, little league sites, etc. You can make your own custom recipes as well.

I'll make a config.wyam file with this inside:

Settings.Host = "test.hanselman.com";
GlobalMetadata["Title"] = "Scott Hanselman";
GlobalMetadata["Description"] = "The personal wyam-made blog of Scott Hanselman";
GlobalMetadata["Intro"] = "Hi, welcome to my blog!";

Then I'll run wyam with:

C:\Users\scott\Desktop\wyamtest>wyam -r Blog
Wyam version 0.14.1-beta
**BUILD**
Loading configuration from file:///C:/Users/scott/Desktop/wyamtest/config.wyam
Installing NuGet packages
    NuGet packages installed in 30059 ms
Recursively loading assemblies
    Assemblies loaded in 368 ms
Cataloging classes
    Classes cataloged in 406 ms
Evaluating configuration script
    Evaluated configuration script in 2594 ms
Root path:
  file:///C:/Users/scott/Desktop/wyamtest
Input path(s):
  file:///C:/Users/scott/.nuget/packages/Wyam.Blog.CleanBlog.0.14.1-beta/content
  theme
  input
Output path:
  output
Cleaning output path output
Cleaned output directory
Executing 7 pipelines
    Executing pipeline "Pages" (1/7) with 8 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "Pages" (1/7) in 221 ms resulting in 13 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "RawPosts" (2/7) with 7 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "RawPosts" (2/7) in 18 ms resulting in 1 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "Tags" (3/7) with 10 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "Tags" (3/7) in 1578 ms resulting in 1 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "Posts" (4/7) with 6 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "Posts" (4/7) in 620 ms resulting in 1 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "Feed" (5/7) with 3 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "Feed" (5/7) in 134 ms resulting in 2 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "RenderPages" (6/7) with 3 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "RenderPages" (6/7) in 333 ms resulting in 4 output document(s)
    Executing pipeline "Resources" (7/7) with 1 child module(s)
        Executed pipeline "Resources" (7/7) in 19 ms resulting in 14 output document(s)
    Executed 7/7 pipelines in 2936 ms

I can also run it with -t for different themes, like "wyam -r Blog -t Phantom":

As with most Static Site Generators I can start with a markdown file like "first-post.md" and included name value pairs of metadata at the top:

Title: First Post
Published: 2016-01-01
Tags: Introduction
---
This is my first post!

If I'm working on my site a lot, I could run Wyam with the -w (WATCH) switch and then edit my posts in Visual Studio Code and Wyam will WATCH the input folder and automatically run over and over, regenerating the site each time I change the inputs! A nice little touch, indeed.

There's a lot of cool examples at https://github.com/Wyamio/Wyam/tree/develop/examples that show you how to generate RSS, do pagination, use Razor but still generate statically, as well as mixing Razor for layouts and Markdown for posts.

The AdventureTime sample is fairly sophisticated (be sure to read the comments in the config.wyam for gotcha) example that includes a custom Pipeline, use of Yaml for front matter, and mixes markdown and Razor.

There's also a ton of modules you can use to extend the build however you like. For example, you could have source images be large and then auto-generate thumbnails like this:

Pipelines.Add("Images",
  ReadFiles("*").Where(x => x.Contains("images\\") && new[] { ".jpg", ".jpeg", ".gif", ".png"}.Contains(Path.GetExtension(x))),
Image()
  .SetJpegQuality(100).Resize(400,209).SetSuffix("-thumb"),
  WriteFiles("*")
);

There's a TON of options. You could even use Excel as the source data for your site, generate CSVs from the Excel OOXML and then generate your site from those CSVs. Sounds crazy, but if you run a small business or non-profit you could quickly make a nice workflow for someone to take control of their own site!

GOTCHA: When generating a site locally your initial reaction may be to open the /output folder and open the index.html in your local browser. You MAY be disappointed with you use a static site generator. Often they generate absolute paths for CSS and Javascript so you'll see a lousy version of your website locally. Either change your templates to generate relative paths OR use a staging site and look at your sites live online. Even better, use the Wyam "preview web server" and run Wyam with a "-p" argument and then visit http://localhost:5080 to see your actual site as it will show up online.

Wyam looks like a really interesting start to a great open source project. It's got a lot of code, good docs, and it's easy to get started. It also has a bunch of advanced features that would enable me to easily embed static site generation in a dynamic app. From the comments, it seems that Dave Glick is doing most of the work himself. I'm sure he'd appreciate you reaching out and helping with some issues.

As always, don't just send a PR without talking and working with the maintainers of your favorite open source projects. Also, ask if they have issues that are friendly to http://www.firsttimersonly.com.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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