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Metalsmith

An extremely simple, pluggable static site generator.

In Metalsmith, all of the logic is handled by plugins. You simply chain them together.

How does it work?​

Metalsmith works in three simple steps:

  1. Read all the files in a source directory.
  2. Invoke a series of plugins that manipulate the files.
  3. Write the results to a destination directory!

Each plugin is invoked with the contents of the source directory, and each file can contain YAML front-matter that will be attached as metadata, so a simple file like...

---
title: A Catchy Title
date: 2014-12-01
---

An informative article.

...would be parsed into...

{
  'path/to/my-file.md': {
    title: 'A Catchy Title',
    date: new Date('2014-12-01'),
    contents: new Buffer('An informative article.')
  }
}

...which any of the plugins can then manipulate however they want. And writing the plugins is incredibly simple, just take a look at the example drafts plugin.

Of course they can get a lot more complicated too. That's what makes Metalsmith powerful; the plugins can do anything you want!

The secret...​

We keep referring to Metalsmith as a "static site generator", but it's a lot more than that. Since everything is a plugin, the core library is actually just an abstraction for manipulating a directory of files.