How to create a no-DB blog with Sinatra?

I'm using Sinatra to build a site and that site will have, among other things, a blog area that I'll infrequently post articles to.

What I'd ideally like to do is have a directory of markdown files that the articles are in and to publish a new article, I'd just add a new markdown file.

The main /articles page would loop through that directory and pull the title from the markdown file's metadata.

---
title: This is my title
excerpt: This is an excerpt from the article
---

So, what I'm not sure of here is how to approach this. How would I loop through a directory of markdown files and properly display them?

FWIW, I'm using a "classic style" Sinatra app here.

Comments

[Ryan Crispin Heneise]

Here's a blog that's done in Sinatra, similar to what you describe: github.com/cesarsalazar/Sinatra-Ma...

To read the frontmatter, you'd need to read the file and parse out the YAML:

# app.rb
# ...
get '/:article' do
  @content = RDiscount.new( File.open("contents/" + params["article"].gsub("-", "_").concat(".md")).read ).to_html
  @frontmatter = YAML.load(@content)
  @title = @frontmatter['title']
  @excerpt = @frontmatter['excerpt']
end

YAML should load the frontmatter at the beginning of the file and ignore the rest.

[Josh Pigford]

This is perfect. Thanks Ryan!

[Ryan Crispin Heneise]

I just re-read the code, and realized you'll probably want to load the file into a variable before running RDiscount on it. Otherwise you'll be trying to parse an HTML file instead of the original markdown file.

get '/:article' do
  markdown = File.open("contents/" + params["article"].gsub("-", "_").concat(".md")).read )

  @frontmatter = YAML.load(markdown)
  @title = @frontmatter['title']
  @excerpt = @frontmatter['excerpt']

  @content = RDiscount.new(markdown).to_html
end