GitBlog.md

A static blog using Markdown pulled from your git repository.

Step 1 : $ vi 2019/06/21/index.md
Step 2 : $ git add . && git commit -m "new article" && git push origin master
Step 3 : That's it
Step 4 : No seriously you're done, go check your updated blog

• How it works
• Installation
• Writing an article
• Modules
• Configuration

How it works

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There are 4 majors features of this project :

1. Home page

diagram (click)

When you access the root url of your blog, the app will fetch the template and inject the list of currently available articles.

2. Article page

diagram (click)

As you access an article link, the server will fetch it's index.md Markdown file and render it in plain HTML using Showdown.

3. Git webhook

diagram (click)

As you configured your data repository, when you push any data, it will trigger the webhook that will perform a git pull then refresh the article list.

4. RSS feed

diagram (click)

On the /rss endpoint, the servers gives you a RSS feed based on the list of articles which you can bookmark.

Installation

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1. Download and install the latest version from the repo

git clone https://github.com/klemek/gitblog.md.git
npm install --production

2. Create your config file

cd gitblog.md
cp config.example.json config.json

then edit the config.json file with your custom values. For example, you might want to change the app's port with :

{
  "node_port": 3030
}

See Configuration for more info.

3. Start your server

npm run
#or
node src/server.js

You can check that it's up and running at http://localhost:3000/

You might want to use something like screen to separate the process from your current terminal session.

4. Customize the blog's style

At npm install a first article will be created for the current date. You can see it as an example of rendering of your blog. Use it to edit your templates and styles located on the data folder.

At first, home page and articles are rendered using EJS engine but you can customize that into the configuration.

Resources are located on the data folder and can be referenced as the root of your blog.

/styles/main.css => data/styles/main.css

In your template, the following data is sent :

details (click)

• info (every pages)
  • title : the blog's title as in the config
  • description the blog's description as in the config
  • host : the specified or guessed host with the protocol
  • version : the GitBlog.md current running version
  • request : the Express request object
  • config : the content of the config
• article (article pages only)
  • title : the full title
  • thumbnail the URL path of the thumbnail
  • url : the URL path for this article (with the title)
  • date : a JS date
  • year
  • month
  • day
  • path : the URL path for the folder of the article (without the title)
  • realPath : the system's path for the folder
  • escapedTitle : the code with alphanumeric and underscore characters only
• error (error pages only) : the error code

5. Create and init your git source

You need to create a new repository on your favorite Git service.

#gitblog.md/
cd data
git init
git remote add origin <url_of_your_repo.git>
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push -u origin master

Now you just have to edit a local copy of your articles and, when you push them, to perform a simple git pull on that data folder.

6. Refresh content with a webhook (optional)

Create a webhook on your git source (On GitHub, in the Settings/Webhooks part of the repository.) with the following parameters :

• Payload URL : https://<url_of_your_server>/webhook
• Content type : application/json
• Events : Just the push event

Now the server will perform the git pull task for you after a successful push on GitHub.

7. Securize your webhook (optional)

Here are the steps for Github, if you use another platform adapt it your way (header format on the config) :

• Create a password or random secret
• Edit your configuration to add webhook info

"webhook": {
    "endpoint": "/webhook",
    "secret": "<value>",
    "signature_header": "X-Hub-Signature"
  },

• Launch the server
• Update your webhook on github to include the secret
• Check if Github successfully reached the endpoint

8. Keep your server always up and running (optionnal)

This project package.json comes with a nodemon config.

After installing (npm i -g nodemon) you can then run the app with juste the nodemon command in the working directory.

With this method, you can do a simple git pull to update your server.

Writing an article

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You need to write your article (and templates) on the git repository but keep the data directory on the server untouched to prevent any changes to harm the git pull normal behavior.

To be referenced, an article need to be on a specific path containing its date and have a Markdown index file :

data/year/month/day/index.md

note that month and day need to be 0 padded (5th of june 2019 => 2019/06/05)

On your Markdown file you can write anything but some informations will be fetched automatically :

• Title : first level 1 header (#)
• Thumbnail : first thumbnail tagged image (like ![thumbnail](url))

On that same folder, you can place resources like images and reference them in relative paths :

![](./image.png) => data/year/month/day/image.png

note that you cannot place resources on subfolders

Any URL like /year/month/day/anything/ will redirect to this article (and link to correct resources)

Modules

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• RSS
  It allows your users to use the feed to be updated as soon as a new article is out
• Webhook
  It update your blog from your online repo when it's updated
• Prism
  It highlight code blocks to be more readable (more info here, you will need the corresponding CSS file on your templates)
• MathJax
  It allows you to add math equations to your articles by simply writing LaTeX between $$ for full size (and between $ for inline) (more info here)
• PlantUML
  It allows you to add UML diagrams with PlantUML Syntax between @startuml and @enduml (more info here)
• fa-diagrams
  It allows you to define SVG diagrams with Font-Awesome icons in TOML between @startfad and @endfad (more info here)

Configuration

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• node_port (default: 3000)
  the port the server is listening to
• host (default: none)
  if set (like https://mywebsite.com, it will be used as reference for creating links
  by default, host is guessed based on first request
• data_dir (default: data)
  the directory where will be located the git repo with templates and articles
• view_engine (default: ejs)
  the Express view engine used to render pages from templates
• rate_limit (default: 100)
  number of requests allowed in a time-frame of 15 minutes
• access_log (default: access.log)
  log file where to save access requests (empty to disable)
• error_log (default: error.log)
  log file where to save all server errors (empty to disable)
• modules
  • rss (default: true)
    activate the RSS endpoint and its features
  • webhook (default: true)
    activate the webhook endpoint and its features
  • prism (default: true)
    activate Prism code highlighting
  • mathjax (default: true)
    activate MathJax equations formatting
  • plantuml (default: true)
    activate PlantUML diagram rendering
  • fa-diagrams (default: true)
    activate fa-diagrams rendering
  • hit_counter (default: true)
    activate /stats endpoints and visitor counting (need an active redis connection)
• home
  • title (default: GitBlog.md)
    the title of your blog, strongly advised to be changed
    given to the template to complete page title and metadata
  • description (default: A static blog using Markdown pulled from your git repository)
    the description of your blog, strongly advised to be changed
    given to the template to complete page title and metadata
  • index (default: index.ejs)
    the name of the home page template on the data directory
    it will receive articles, a list of articles for rendering
  • error (default: error.ejs)
    the name of the error page template on the data directory
    it will receive error, the error code
  • hidden (default: [*.ejs,/.git*])
    path matches to be returned 404 when reached
• article
  • index (default: index.md)
    the name of the Markdown page of the article on the /year/month/day/ directory
  • draft (default: draft.md)
    the name of the Markdown page of an article not shown on the list
  • template (default: template.ejs)
    the name of the article page template on the data directory
  • thumbnail_tag: (default: thumbnail)
    the alt text searched to get the thumbnail image on the article
    as in ![<thumbnail_tag>](<url of the image>)
  • default_title: (default: Untitled)
    the title of the article in case a level 1 title was not found
  • default_thumbnail: (default: none)
    the path of the default thumbnail to get from the data directory
• rss
  • title: (default: mygitblog RSS feed)
  • description: (default: a generated RSS feed from my articles)
  • endpoint: (default: /rss)
  • length: (default: 10)
    how many last articles will be present in the feed
• webhook
  • endpoint: (default: /webhook)
  • secret: (default: none)
    see above
  • signature_header: (default: none)
    see above
  • pull_command: (default: git pull)
    the command used by the server on webhook trigger
• showdown
  Options to be applied to Showdown renderer (see showdown options for more info)
• mathjax
  • output_format: (default: svg)
    specify the output format between svg, html or MathMl (mml)
  • speak_text: (default: true)
    activate the alternate text in equations
• hit_counter
  • unique_visitor_timeout: (default: 7200000 / 2h) specify the time (in ms) before a visitor can be accounted again
• robots
  • list_url: (default: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/atmire/COUNTER-Robots/master/COUNTER_Robots_list.json) url to fetch for web crawlers patterns
  • list_file: (default: robots_list.json) file to store web crawlers patterns
• redis
  Options to connect to redis (see redis options for more info)
  • host: (default: localhost)
  • port: (default: 6379)