nanoc 3

nanoc is a simple but very flexible static site generator written in Ruby. It operates on local files, and therefore does not run on the server. nanoc “compiles” the local source files into HTML (usually), by evaluating eRuby, Markdown, etc.

Note: This documentation looks best with Yardoc, not RDoc.

Resources

The nanoc web site contains a few useful resources to help you get started with nanoc:

If you need assistance, the following places will help you out:

The discussion group
The IRC channel

Source Code Documentation

The source code is located in lib/nanoc3 and is structured in a few directories:

base contains the bare essentials necessary for nanoc to function
cli contains the commandline interface
data_sources contains the standard data sources (Nanoc3::DataSource subclasses), such as the filesystem data source
helpers contains helpers, which provide functionality some sites may find useful, such as the blogging and tagging helpers
extra contains stuff that is not needed by nanoc itself, but which may be used by helpers, data sources, filters or VCSes.
filters contains the standard filters (Nanoc3::Filter subclasses) such as ERB, Markdown, Haml, ...

The namespaces (modules) are organised like this:

Nanoc3 is the namespace for everything nanoc-related (obviously). The classes in lib/nanoc3/base are part of this module (not Nanoc3::Base)
Nanoc3::CLI containing everything related to the commandline tool.
Nanoc3::DataSources contains the data sources
Nanoc3::Helpers contains the helpers
Nanoc3::Extra contains useful stuff not needed by nanoc itself
Nanoc3::Filters contains the (textual) filters

The central class in nanoc is Nanoc3::Site, so you should start there if you want to explore nanoc from a technical perspective.

Dependencies

nanoc has few dependencies. It is possible to use nanoc programmatically without any dependencies at all, but if you want to use nanoc in a proper way, you’ll likely need some dependencies:

The commandline frontend depends on cli.
The autocompiler depends on mime-types and rack.
Filters and helpers likely have dependencies on their own too.

If you’re developing for nanoc, such as writing custom filters or helpers, you may be interested in the development dependencies:

For documentation generation you’ll need yard.
For packaging you’ll need rubygems (1.3 or newer).
For testing you’ll need mocha and minitest.

Contributors

(In alphabetical order)

Ben Armston
Colin Barrett
Dmitry Bilunov
Brian Candler
Chris Eppstein
Felix Hanley
Starr Horne
Tuomas Kareinen
Nicky Peeters
Christian Plessl
Šime Ramov
Xavier Shay
Arnau Siches
“Soryu”
Eric Sunshine
Dennis Sutch

Special thanks to Ale Muñoz.

Contact

You can reach me at denis.defreyne@stoneship.org.