A minimal, lightweight static website/blog generator. Just a single file which you can modify to your liking.

• Clone or download this repository to your computer
• Modify/add static files to the static dir
• Modify/add content in the content dir
• Run python3 appie.py, the site is generated in the _site dir
• Upload to some webhosting platform

• Introduction
• Usage
• The Code
• Credits
• License
• Support

In this repository you will find an example website with a MarkDown blog and some static .html pages. You can generate this into a functioning website using the provided appie.py python script.

The idea behind this stems from Permacomputing in which we aim for minimal systems. You can do what you want with Appie but the example is a very minimal HTML site without any Javascript and other bloat.

The name Appie comes from the initial website generator which was in use at z25.org. This second version is a complete minimalized rewrite.

1: Clone the repository using git (you can also download the .zip)

git clone https://github.com/sphaero/appie2

2: Install the dependencies (only jinja2, pillow and markdown). Might be best to do in a virtual env From appie2's root directory run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

3: Do a first run:

python3 appie.py

You will now have the full website in the '_site' directory.

You can host a webserver using python to preview the site:

cd _site
python3 -m http.server

Now open a browser and go to http://localhost:8000

4: Upload the _site directory to a website hosting platform.

If you managed to generate the provided example site you can now modify it to your liking.

The code is quite simple. From the main() function we first prepare the '_site' directory and copy the contents of the static dir into it.

We then setup some global parameters (params) and try add parameters from a saved .json file if it exists.

We then walk the contents af the 'content' directory to a tree dictionary containing all meta data of the content directory. For example the dictionary looks like this:

{
    ".": {
        "_path": ".",
        "_srcpath": "./test",
        "_type": "dir",
        "bla.md": {
            "_ext": ".md",
            "_filename": "bla",
            "_mtime": 1703251224.8210585,
            "_sitedir": ".",
            "_sitepath": "./bla.md",
            "_srcpath": "./test/bla.md",
            "_type": "file",
        },
        "test.png": {
            "_ext": ".png",
            "_filename": "test",
            "_mtime": 1703254450.232499,
            "_sitedir": ".",
            "_sitepath": "./test.png",
            "_srcpath": "./test/test.png",
            "_type": "file",
        },
    },
    "testdir": {
        "_path": "testdir",
        "_srcpath": "./test/testdir",
        "_type": "dir",
        "test.jpg": {
            "_ext": ".jpg",
            "_filename": "test",
            "_mtime": 1703254472.9648764,
            "_sitedir": "testdir",
            "_sitepath": "testdir/test.jpg",
            "_srcpath": "./test/testdir/test.jpg",
            "_type": "file",
        },
        "test.md": {
            "_ext": ".md",
            "_filename": "test",
            "_mtime": 1703251351.642544,
            "_sitedir": "testdir",
            "_sitepath": "testdir/test.md",
            "_srcpath": "./test/testdir/test.md",
            "_type": "file",
        },
    },
}

We then extract the root directories of the content dir which we will use to generate the nav entries for the navigation menu.

Finally we recursively run the parse_dir() method on the tree dictionary. So parse_dir() is called for every directory entry in the tree. If an entry is not a directory but a file then parse_path() is called on the entry. Finally for every dir we call generate_index() which will generate an index.html page for the directory.

parse_path() parses markdown, plain html, and images. It will parse them through jinja2 and finally copies to the '_site' dir. All meta data and params are passed to jinja2. If it can't match a file to parse it will just copy it to the '_site' dir.