tinyjam

A bare-bones, zero-configuration static site generator that deliberately has no features, an experiment in radical simplicity. Essentially a tiny, elegant glue between EJS templates and Markdown with freeform structure (enabling incremental adoption) and convenient defaults, written in under 120 lines of JavaScript.

• Example
• Documentation
  • Getting started
  • Data files
  • Templates
  • Command line
  • Node.js API
• FAQ

Example

# source directory
├── posts
│   ├── 01.md
│   ├── 02.md
│   └── %.ejs
├── _header.ejs
└── index.ejs

# output
├── posts
│   ├── 01.html
│   └── 02.html
└── index.html

An example template:

<%- include('_header.ejs') %>

<% for (const [name, {date, title}] of Object.entries(posts)) { %>
    <h3><%= new Date(date).toDateString() %>: <a href="posts/<%= name %>.html"><%= title %></a></h3>
<% } %>

Browse the full example and see the generated website.

Documentation

Getting started

npx tinyjam source_dir output_dir

Tinyjam doesn't impose any folder structure, processing any data files (*.md and *.yml) and templates (*.ejs) it encounters and copying over anything else.

Data files

All *.md and *.yml files inside the working directory are interpreted as data, available for any templates all at once as JavaScript objects. For example, given the following folder structure:

├── posts
│   ├── 01.md
│   ├── 02.md
├── data.yml
└── about.md

A template in this folder will have the contents available as:

posts: {
  "01": {title: "First post", date: new Date("2020-02-20"), body: "Hello world"},
  "02": {title: "Second post", date: new Date("2020-02-21"), body: "Hello there"}
},
data: {author: "Vladimir Agafonkin"},
about: {body: "This is an awesome blog about me."}

Markdown is rendered according to the GitHub Flavored Markdown specification.

Keys are in alphabetical order of file names (except that, as always in JavaScript, integer-like keys such as 2024 come first in numeric order). Files or folders that map to the same key (e.g. posts.md next to posts/, or foo.md next to foo.yml) are an error.

Data is read-only, since it's shared by all templates: use non-mutating methods like toSorted() instead of sort().

Templates

Tinyjam uses EJS (through yeahjs, a fast EJS subset), a templating system where you can use plain JavaScript, so it's both powerful and easy to learn. All *.ejs files it encounters are rendered with the collected data in the following way:

• <filename>.ejs files are rendered as <filename>.html.
• %.ejs renders every Markdown file in the same folder (<filename>.md) as <filename>.html with the corresponding file's data. It works with other extensions too, e.g. %.json.ejs renders <filename>.json.
• Files and folders starting with _ (e.g. _header.ejs, _partials/, _draft.md) are source only: templates are not rendered (use them as EJS includes) and other files are not copied, but their Markdown and YAML data is still available (e.g. root._authors).
• Templates are rendered as html by default, but you can use other extensions, e.g. main.css.ejs will be rendered as main.css.

In addition to the collected data, templates have access to the following properties:

• rootPath is a relative path to the root of the project — useful as a prefix for links in includes as they may be used on different nesting levels (e.g. <%= rootPath %>/index.css).
• root references all of the project's data, which is useful for accessing data in includes or outside of the current template's folder.

Command line

Install with NPM to use tinyjam as a CLI: npm install -g tinyjam. Usage:

tinyjam source_dir [output_dir] [--breaks] [--silent]

• --breaks: Add single line breaks as <br> in Markdown.
• --silent: Run silently (unless there's an error).

If output_dir is not provided, it's assumed equal to source_dir. This is useful for incrementally converting static sites without changing deployment folders.

Node.js API

import tinyjam from 'tinyjam';

tinyjam(sourceDir, outputDir, {
    log: false,   // log the progress (like in the CLI)
    breaks: false // Markdown: add single line breaks (like in GitHub comments)
});

Markdown is rendered with marked, so you can configure it further (e.g. with extensions) by calling marked.use(...) before running tinyjam.

Note that the project only supports Node v20+.

FAQ

Why build yet another static site generator?

I wanted to add some templating to my personal static websites to make them easier to maintain (e.g. my band's album page, which is pure HTML/CSS/JS), but never found a static site generator that would be simple and unobtrusive enough for my liking.

A tool I envisioned would not involve meticulous configuration, special folder structure, reading through hundreds of documentation pages, bringing in a ton of dependencies, or making you learn a new language. At the same time, it would be flexible enough to make multilingual websites without plugins and convoluted setup.

Ideally, I would just rename some html files to ejs, move some content to Markdown files, add light templating and be done with it. So I decided to build my own minimal tool for this, but will be happy if anyone else finds it useful.

Can you add <feature X>?

Sorry — probably not, unless it fits the concept of a minimal, zero-configuration tool.

How fast is Tinyjam?

Pretty fast. I didn't see a point in benchmarking because most of the time is spent parsing Markdown/YAML and rendering EJS anyway, but corresponding dependencies (marked, @mourner/yeahml, yeahjs) are very well optimized.

Why EJS for templating, and can I use another templating system?

EJS is also an extremely simple, minimal system, and it allows you to use plain JavaScript for templates, making it pretty powerful with almost no learning curve. To make it even faster, I crafted my own implementation (yeahjs). No plans to support other template engines.

How do I make a reactive single-page app with dynamic routing, hydration, bundle splitting and service worker caching?

There's no need for all that in a static website. If you do have a case for it, you'll need a different tool.

How do I make a multilingual website?

Tinyjam gives you freedom to approach this in many different ways, but here's an example:

en.ejs: <%- include('_content.ejs', {lang: 'en'}) %>
fr.ejs: <%- include('_content.ejs', {lang: 'fr'}) %>
_content.ejs: <%= content[locals.lang].body %> (use either content/en.md or content/fr.md)

How do I add pagination?

At the moment, you can't. It's not a great UI pattern anyway — make an archive page with links to all content instead.

How do I do asset optimization, CSS preprocessing, TypeScript transpilation, etc.?

Do all the preprocessing in the source directory prior to running tinyjam.

How do I add code syntax highlighting?

Here's an example using the tinyjam API with highlight.js and marked-highlight:

import tinyjam from 'tinyjam';
import {marked} from 'marked';
import {markedHighlight} from 'marked-highlight';
import hljs from 'highlight.js';

marked.use(markedHighlight({
    langPrefix: 'hljs language-',
    highlight: (code, lang) => hljs.highlight(code, {language: hljs.getLanguage(lang) ? lang : 'plaintext'}).value
}));

tinyjam(sourceDir, outputDir);

Similarly, you can add typographic quotes and dashes with marked-smartypants.