Geno: a small and opinionated static site generator

Another week, another project, and this time it’s yet another static site generator.

Geno is a small and opinionated static site generator for easily generating a simple site for your NPM projects based on the project’s package.json file.

Opinionated?

Well, it is pretty customizable but the defaults are tailored to my needs1. Like I stated in the project’s README file, I find that hand crafting a new site for each project can be quite tedious. I’m also not a designer.

Configuration

At the most basic level, Geno needs these fields in the package.json file:

{
  "name": "module",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "description": "An example module.",
  "license": "MIT"
}

That’s it! You can also add a geno.json file at the root of your project to enable some extra features. Check out the GitHub repository for more information.

The anatomy of a Node.js module

During the creation of it I decided to document the process behind it, Even though it wasn’t a particular big or compilicated project. I though that it could be interesting or atleast provide some kind of value for someone2.

The idea

The initial idea was that I simply wanted to create a project site for Partially. After some tinkering it hit me that it would be pretty cool to use the package.json file as a base for a website and off I went. In the end it’s a pretty simple idea: read the configuration file(s), add the data to the template and spit out the compiled site.

The build

I actually started with the design first3, since I’d already begun to work on it. I then went on to pick a templating engine. There’s a plethora of them available and I played around with both doT.js and EJS before I settled on Nunjucks. It’s fairly lightweight, fast and has the perfect logic for making the kind of template that I wanted. I also needed some extra file system functions and fs-extra came to the rescue. It makes copying files and creating folder paths a breeze.

The features

Although I wanted to keep it as simple as possible I realized that it would be nice to have some extra features, so I decided to add the option to use the geno.json file. This meant that I can add some additional information to a project’s site without too much of a hassle.

If you want you can take a look at Geno’s own project site to see how it turned out. All in all I’m pretty happy with it.


  1. And my laziness. 

  2. I hope… 

  3. I call it “Sass-driven development”. I’m not very good at it. 

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