feather ssg (static site generator)

html/css/js + markdown + gulp automation + hot-reloading to create lightweight static sites

feather-ssg.dev

• Features
• Roadmap
• Install
• Development environment
• Production builds
• Deploying to Vercel
• Technologies Used
• Helpful code editor packages

Features

• Fast reload on all edits
• QR code for physical mobile web app development (also with fast reload)
• HTML + Nunjucks Templating with Layouts
• SCSS => CSS
• CSS & JS Minified
• Dark Mode check with JavaScript (adds .dark-mode to body)
• Markdown support + Front Matter for page data
• Meta supported: title, description, keywords, canonical, robots, etc.
• Relative / Absolute pathing handled for you
• Sitemap.xml created
• Build stats
  • Page count
  • CSS before and after minification
• eslint/prettier

Roadmap

• [ ] Local WYSIWYG Editor
• [ ] Category support
• [ ] Show HTML before and after sizes in build report
• [ ] Use purgecss?
• [ ] Font face
• [ ] Theming (+ predefined palettes, scss variables and root css usage)

Install

run: yarn or yarn install

Development environment

• start local server, run: yarn dev
• stop local server: ctl + c

Production builds

create for Production deploy

• run: yarn prod
• creates: /static_prod/

Deploying to Vercel

• Make sure you have Vercel CLI installed globally on your machine
• then run: yarn prod to make sure you have all static files generated and ready for deployment
• then run: vercel (this will prompt a login if you are not already)
• going through the setup flow, make sure to set the directory your code is located to be: ./static_prod
• side note, i've added a custom domain, (feather-ssg.dev) so to push to that domain i run: vercel --prod

Technologies Used

• Gulp v.4
  • task()
  • watch()
  • series()
  • parallel()
  • forward() with Gulp v.4, they removed the ability for forward reference a task, to help performance, so you must define a task before it is called.
• SCSS & CSS Minification
  • gulp-sass
  • gulp-clean-css
• Nunjucks & HTML Minification
  • gulp-nunjucks-render
  • gulp-htmlmin
• BrowserSync with Gulp
  • for hot-reloading after a change is made to, sccs/js/nunjucks
  • QR Code Plugin for quick development on a physical mobile device (same wifi network required).
• Notification/Error handling:
  • node-notifier
  • error handling is happening at the compile state for both scss & nunjucks
• Cleaning up directories before a new compile: del
• CLI helpful coloring using chalk

Helpful code editor packages

• For Atom:
  • Syntax highlighting for nunjucks templates
  • Displays Colors used in project (even scss variables)