Create a small blog using hakyll-contrib

Create your blog software in 15 minutes with Hakyll
Published on June 22, 2011 under the tag haskell

What?

One of my side projects is Hakyll, a static site generator written in Haskell. Altough the name is a play on Jekyll, Hakyll bears more resemblance to nanoc.

The resemblance is there because nanoc’s author Denis is a good friend of mine, who also lives close to me, and we’ve had a number of interesting discussions on static site generators.

Both nanoc and Hakyll offer a lot of flexibility, behaving more like a web publishing API/library than a simple tool. This brings me to (in my opinion) the key feature of Jekyll: it is simple. You can get started with a website by not much more than simply throwing a bunch of text files in a directory and running the tool.

Today, I’ve released a package hakyll-contrib which allows just that. The rest of this blogpost is a tutorial, which is also included in the Haddock documentation.

Installation

The idea is that you don’t have to write your configuration yourself: you just follow some conventions, and Hakyll does the rest. Start by installing the tool:

cabal install hakyll-contrib

You can generate a site which will serve as a good starting point by running the command-line tool:

hakyll-contrib small-blog

small-blog is the template used – I might add more templates later. Hakyll will generate a simple example site for you. The necessary configuration is placed in the small-blog.hs file. Compile and run it to create the demo site:

ghc --make small-blog.hs
./small-blog build
./small-blog preview

Then, visit the site in your browser.

Further conventions

Images should be placed in the images/ or img/ folder. The are copied directly. Other static files (but not images) can be placed in static/ or files/. The favicon.ico file is an exception, it is just placed in the top-level directory.

CSS files should be placed in css/, and JavaScript files in js/.

Then, we arrive at pages. You can create any number of pages on your site: just create files in one of the documents pandoc supports (.html, .markdown, .rst, .lhs…) in the top-level directory.

These pages may use a number of preconfigured $key$’s:

For example usage, look at the example site we generated using hakyll-contrib small-blog.

Now, one can wonder where these posts come from. Simple: all pages in the posts/ directory are considered posts. Note that a naming format of

posts/year-month-date-title.extension

is mandatory. An example:

posts/2011-06-19-hello-world.markdown

This allows Hakyll to parse the date easily, among other things. Again, look at the example site for some example posts.

Additionaly, there is the templates/ folder. This folder holds the templates for your site. For a small-blog configuration, your site should have exactly three templates:

Again, the example should clarify things.

This configuration should be enough to create a small personal website. But, we have only touched the surface of what is possible with Hakyll. For more information, check out the tutorials.

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