tack

A static site generator for the long run.

The project's goal is to create and maintain a sustainable tool that does the (arguably pretty easy) job of filling HTML templates with content well enough now and in ten years when you come back to update that minimal website you own.

Website: https://burningsoda.com/software/tack
Manpage: https://github.com/roblillack/tack/blob/master/tack.1.md

Installation

Download binaries for FreeBSD, Linux, macOS (ARM & Intel), NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Windows from the release page or install from source (you will need to have Git and Go installed) like this:

go get github.com/roblillack/tack

Usage

Create directory for your site somewhere using a structure like this:

mysite                     Your website project dir
├── content                Contains a subdir per page
│   ├── about-me           Page will be available at /about-me
│   │   ├── default.yaml   Page variables, page will use “default” template
│   │   ├── body.md        One page variable “content” will hold this files'
│   │   │                  content processed as HTML.
│   │   └── me.jpg         All files not recognized as metadata or markup will
|   |                      be regarded as assets and be copied to output as is.
│   ├── bikes              Another page, /bikes
│   │   └── body.md        Works, even if no other page variables are defined.
│   └── work               Again, another page: /work
│       └── serious.yaml   Different template used here.
├── templates
│   ├── default.mustache   The default template, used by /about-me and /bikes.
│   └── serious.mustache   Another template, used by /work
└── public                 Files in here will not be touched and will be copied
    ├── style.css          over to output/ as is.
    ├── logo.png
    └── js
        ├── main.js
        ├── tracker.js
        └── library.js

To create the static site in output/, just run

tack

from inside your site directory. Alternatively run:

tack serve

and open your browser at http://localhost:8080/ while working on the site.

Once you're done, copy over the content of output/ to a hosting service of your choice.

Documentation

Learn more on the tack website

Features that will not be part of future tack versions

There are lots of features that are more or less a standard part of static site generators nowadays but don't really align well with the goals of the project and therefor will not be added to tack.

• Plugin support
• Image resizing
• JavaScript transpilation
• JavaScript bundling
• JavaScript minification

Features that might be implemented as part of future tack versions

• Sitemap creation
• CSS transpilation (we used to have less support)
• TOML file metadata support
• Liquid template support
• More configuration options

Contributing

To report bugs, or to propose new features, please see the tack bug tracker.

If you'd like to contribute, feel free to create a pull request to implement new features or bug-fixes. Ensure that all code has a proper unit test and is written in idiomatic Go.

Regarding security concerns, please see the separate Security Policy

License

MIT/X11.