LuaWebGen - static website generator, powered by Lua. Somewhat inspired by Hugo.

Webpages are generated using HTML and markdown templates with embedded Lua code. CSS files can also include code.

• Why?
• Example
• Installation / Usage
• Documentation

Why?

The rant: After using Hugo for a little while I got fed up with how annoying it was to add custom functionality (everything has to be a template), how "content" and "static" files were treated differently, how CSS files were excluded from the templating system, how you couldn't display data from the data folder easily on pages, how confusing index files were, and other silly things.

Being a programmer, I thought treating all files equally and enabling the use of an actual programming language would solve most of these problems.

Example

A blog post, my-first-post.md:

{{
page.title = "The First!"
local foot = "not hand"
}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Duis nec justo mollis, varius nulla sed, commodo nibh.

Foot is {{foot}}<br>
1 + 2 * 3 = {{1+2*3}}<br>
Current year is {{os.date"%Y"}}

## List of Cats

{{for i, cat in ipairs(data.myCats)}}
- Cat {{i}} is named {{cat.name}}.
{{end}}

![Cute cat]({{ getCatImageUrl() }})

Page template, page.html:

{{include"header"}}
{{include"navigation"}}

<main>
	<h1 id="{{urlize(page.title)}}">{{page.title}}</h1>
	{{page.content}}
</main>

{{include"footer"}}

Installation / Usage

LuaWebGen requires Lua 5.1 and these libraries:

• Lua-GD for image manipulation.
• LuaFileSystem for file system access.
• LuaSocket for URL handling.

If you're on Windows you can simply install Lua for Windows.

Note: LuaWebGen has only been tested on Windows.

To generate a website, run this from the command line:

cd path/to/site/root
lua path/to/LuaWebGen/main.lua build

LuaWebGen expects this folder hierarchy:

site-root/
    content/           -- All website content, including pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files.
        index.html|md  -- Homepage/root index page.
    data/              -- Optional data folder. Can contain Lua, TOML and XML files.
    layouts/           -- All HTML layout templates.
        page.html      -- Default page template.
    logs/              -- Automatically created log file folder.
    output/            -- Automatically created output folder.
    scripts/           -- Optional Lua script folder. The scripts must return a function.
    config.lua         -- Site-wide configurations.

Everything in the content folder will be processed and end up in the output folder.

Note: The output folder is automatically cleaned from files and folders that do not exist in the content folder, so it's not a good idea to save files in the output folder.