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ZODIAC

Zodiac is a static website generator. It uses existing tools on UNIX-like systems, like awk, sh, find, cp, etc., to generate a static website. Zodiac is small, fast and sports a simple templating system and the ability to customize output using helpers written in awk.

zodiac

Zodiac was built to get started quickly, but be flexible enough to add more features as you need them. For example, a basic Zodiac site could be built with only a layout file:

src/
  main.layout
  index.md
  about.md
  contact.md

If you want helpers, metadata or a custom config, add them any time:

src/
  main.layout
  index.md
  index.meta
  helpers.awk
  about.md
  about.meta
  contact.md
  contact.meta
  .zod/
    config

Zodiac doesn’t require a big general programming language like Ruby or Python. Since static websites are just a directory of files, tools like sh, cp and find, which are pretty good at working with files, can be used to process them.

Tools following the UNIX “text is the protocol” paradigm can be used to pipe the site’s templates and filter them. awk is a text processing language that Zodiac utilizes to bind metadata to templates and the layout. The resulting output is written to the appropriate place in the output directory.

Building a zodiac site is fast. Awk is very small and doesn’t take as long to boot up as other interpreters.

Download

curl -O https://github.com/nuex/zodiac/archive/v0.2.5.tar.gz

Development

Development happens using git SCM:

git clone git://github.com/nuex/zodiac.git

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