OSD600 Blog #2 - Release 0.1

For our first release in OSD600 (developing a CLI static site generator) I decided to implement the program using Node.js, by leveraging the "commander" npm module.

The source code for the program can be found here.

The optional features I've implemented into the program are:

1. Ability to parse title from input to both populate the <title>...</title> tag and to generate an <h1>...</h1> at the top of the web page.
2. Allowing the user to specify a stylesheet URL to be applied to all generated HTML files.
3. Allow for a recursive search of the input folder, to also generate HTML files from text files in subfolders.

Examples of generated HTML files from text files can be found here.

I would greatly appreciate any and all feedback!

Overview

This tool enables the user to:

1. Specify a ".txt" file to have it converted into an HTML webpage
2. Specify a folder containing multiple ".txt" files to convert all of them into HTML web pages. The program will recursively search subfolders for ".txt" files as well.

Installation

To install this program, first git clone the repository.

Then open a terminal inside of the newly created folder, and run npm install -g.

This command will install the programming globally on your system.

Options

There are four options available to the user to use with this CLI program.

Short Form	Long Form	Description
-v	--version	Outputs the current version of the program.
-h	--help	Outputs a help message explaining the program's usage.
-i	--input	Allows the user to specify either a single .txt file, or a folder containing .txt files.
-s	--stylesheet	Allows the user to specify a URL containing a CSS stylesheet to apply to the generated HTML files.

Usage

Current Version

To check the current version of the program, the user can run:

rohan-ssg -v or rohan-ssg --version

Which will output:

The current version is: x.x.x

Help

To see a message explaining the program, the user can run:

rohan-ssg -h or rohan-ssg --help

Which will output:

This program is used to generate a static HTML web page from a given .txt file OR a folder containing .txt files.
The following options are available: 
    -v, --version: current program version
    -h, --help: program instructions
    -i, --input: path input folder or file to be converted to HTML. Note that folders are recursively searched for .txt files.
    -s, --stylesheet: stylesheet url to be used in the HTML file

    The files will be saved in a '/dist' folder in the same directory as the input file/folder.

    For example, to generate a single HTML file from a .txt file with a specific stylesheet URL, use the following command:
    rohan-ssg -i .PATH/TO/FILE/input.txt -s https://example.com/stylesheet.css

Input (with and without stylesheet)

For a specific file, the user can run:

rohan-ssg -i PATH/TO/FILE/example.txt or rohan-ssg --input PATH/TO/FILE/example.txt

This will then generate a /dist directory, containing the HTML file that had been generated.

For a folder:

rohan-ssg -i PATH/TO/FOLDER or rohan-ssg --input PATH/TO/FOLDER

Similar to above, this will also generate a /dist directory, which will contain all of the HTML files that had been generated from all of the .txt files inside of the specified folder (including subfolders).

To specify a stylesheet to be applied to all HTML files, the user can choose to use the -s or --stylesheet option as follows:

rohan-ssg -i PATH/TO/FOLDER -s https://example.com/stylesheet.css or rohan-ssg -i PATH/TO/FILE/example.txt -s https://example.com/stylesheet.css

This will link the specified stylesheet (which must be a url) to all HTML files that have been generated.