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blog-cli: A CLI for Blogging with Static Site Generators

Kahlil Lechelt on January 18, 2019

My blog is built with Hugo. Every blog I ever had was built with a static site generator or a file based CMS. I love static site generators, they m...

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Peter Witham • Apr 24 '19

This is a great idea for a tool, two questions

Is it possible to edit the frontmatter template easily to make it work just the way you want for any given site?
Can it work with multiple blogs?

Keep up the great work!

Kahlil Lechelt • Apr 24 '19

Currently it is not possible to configure the front matter. But that could be added as a feature quite easily. Feel free to send a PR :D

If you want to switch to a different blog just set a new path. This could be made easier too though...

Peter Witham • Apr 24 '19

Thanks for the reply, I plan to put some time aside to take a deeper look and see if I can contribute something useful to it.

Kahlil Lechelt • Apr 24 '19

Sweet, looking forward to it.

Kahlil Lechelt • Apr 24 '19 • Edited

Here is an idea: blog-cli could just check if there is a blog-cli property in the package.json that has a property pathToPosts or something and if yes it could just use that.

Multiple blogs could be suported by adding multiple paths in there that have an alias name as a property or something:

{
  "blog-cli": {
    "paths": {
      "work-blog": "/my/work/blog/posts",
      "personal-blog": "/my/personal/blog/posts"
    }
}

And then there should be a command line flag that should allow you to switch between blogs, like: blog --switch-to work-blog for example.

Peter Witham • Apr 25 '19

I think I'd need to see an implementation of the idea to really get it.

I have been working on adding the ability to work with more than one template and to set a template path, I have it working but I need to clean it up a little and test for when it's not specified.

Once I have it done I'll submit it as a pull request, my fork is here
github.com/GrfxGuru/blog-cli

Kahlil Lechelt • May 9 '19

I made an Electron app based on blog-cli now: kahlillechelt.com/2019/05/07/annou...

Peter Witham • May 9 '19

Great! I will be taking a look at it.

John Bokma • Jul 22 '20

Being aware of this issue I wrote my own static site generator differently: it uses a single input file. While I use it mainly to generate a blog, Plurrrr, it certainly can be used to generate (small) sites with it as well. The SSG is available on GitHub: tumblelog.

Michael Williams • Apr 25 '19

Hi Kahlil,

I hope it will work with Pelican as well.

Kahlil Lechelt • Apr 25 '19

Hi! What is Pelican?

Michael Williams • Apr 25 '19

It's Static site generator written with Python.

Kahlil Lechelt • Apr 25 '19

So far its not specific to any static site generator. All you need is a folder with markdown files that contain your posts and front matter. If Pelican has a different file format or doesn't use front matter, that can be added quite easily. You can send a PR if you want.

Michael Williams • Apr 25 '19

Yes, pelican blog posts are written in Markdown. This should work then. Thanks a ton.

Kahlil Lechelt • May 9 '19

Check it out I made an Electron app to do the same with a GUI kahlillechelt.com/2019/05/07/annou...

marpme (Marvin) • Mar 3 '19 • Edited

oh wow, didn't know about that one. Thank you very much!

Kahlil Lechelt • Mar 3 '19

Happy to! 🤗

Daniel O. • Mar 3 '19

How do you upload images and embed them?

Kahlil Lechelt • Mar 3 '19

blog-cli doesn’t help you there besides with the publishing. You‘ll have to put the image into the folder your static site generator requires and then you just reference it as you would before in the MD file. Images and text will typically be deployed via a git push and then a Webhook from Netlify for example.

blog-cli is just a thin convenience layer over a static site generator.