Smallblog

A simple self-hosted markdown flat files blog

What is Smallblog

The main goal of this project is to show how easily you can develop a flat file blog with markdown as the primary writing language. It's not perfect, it will never be, some people are already doing great things based on that idea, like Hugo for instance. Let's note though, that's not a static website generator.

Disclaimer

Smallblog is a quick project. It's efficient while there aren't too much files, but please keep in mind that because of its design, the more articles you'll have the more RAM the server will take. This will be fixed someday. Maybe.

As for now, Smallblog is designed to be fast. And that's all. (Which means no markdown parsing for each request, no file opening, everything in RAM)

Configure

Put a conf.yml file next to your smallblog binary. Here are the options you can customize

Key	Description	Default
host	Interface on which the server should listen.	"127.0.0.1"
port	Port on which the server should listen.	8080
debug	Activates the router's debug mode.	false
pages_dir	Local or absolute path to the directory in which your articles are stored	"pages"
title	Blog title (front page)	""
description	Blog Description (front page)	""

Write Posts

There is no naming convention for file names. You can name them whatever you want, it won't chage the server's behaviour. A post (or page/article) file is divided in two parts. The first part is yaml data. The second part is the actual content of your article. The two parts are separated by a blank line.

Here is the list of yaml values you can fill

Key	Description	Mandatory
title	The title of your article.	Yes
description	The description of your article (sub-title)	No
slug	The link you want for your article. If left empty, will be generated from title.	No
author	Author of the article	No
date	The date of writing/publication of your article.	Yes
tags	A list of tags you want to apply on the article (useless right now, but still pretty)	No

If any of the two mandatory values (date and title) are omitted, the parser will complain and simply ignore the file.

Example Post

pages/first-article

title: First Article
description: The reasons I made SmallBlog
slug: first-article
author: Depado
date: 2016-05-06 11:22:00
tags:
    - inspiration
    - dev

# Actual Markdown Content
Notice the blank line right after the `tags` list.
That's how you tell the parser that you are done with yaml format.

This article will be parsed, and available at example.com/post/first-article. It will also be listed at example.com/.

Filesystem Monitoring

The directory you define in your conf.yml file is constantly watched by the server. Which means several things :

• If you create a new file, it will be parsed and added to your site. (Also if you mv a file inside the directory)
• If you modify an exisiting file, it will be parsed and modified on your site if necessary (e.g if the slug changes).
• If you delete an existing file, the article will be removed. (Also if you mv a file out of the directory)

All these changes are instant. Usually a file takes ~250µs to be parsed. When you restart the server, all the files will be parsed again so they are stored in RAM (which is really efficient unless you have 250Mo of markdown file).