assg: ansible-based static site generator

I've always been a huge fan of keeping things simple. Static site generators always seemed pretty neat to me. Why have all that overhead of a database or a complex framework just to share some ideas? I'm also a huge fan of ansible which bakes in the jinja2 template engine.

Since I've already been using ansible to deploy infrastucture and code anyway, I reckoned it wouldn't be that tough to statically generate a website with it and skip the middle-man. This is the result.

usage

If it isn't there already, install ansible through the package manager of your choice.

Create an inventory file with a webhost group, containing the target webservers:

$ cat hosts 
[webhost]
mywebserver.mydomain.tld

Then run the playbook:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml

This will generate a site with the examples specified in roles/assg/vars/main.yaml.

You might want to store site specific information along with blog posts in a separate YAML file. This way, you can manage multiple sites using the same playbook, but with different content.

Assuming your site's configuration is stored as so:

$ cat mycheeseblog.yml
---
# vars file for mycheeseblog.com
site_title: mycheeseblog.com
site_url: http://mycheeseblog.com
bottom_links:
  -
    name: linkedin
    target: http://linkedin.com/me
  -
    name: twitter
    target: https://twitter.com/me
  -
    name: github
    target: https://github.com/me

top_links:
  -
    name: mycoolthing
    target: http://coolthing.org
  -
    name: myotherthing
    target: http://thingsrule.net


blog_posts:
  -
    title: 'eating cheese'
    date: '2017-08-24'
    body: |
      Cheese fest coming up! Can't wait to eat all that cheese.
      Stay tuned for updates!
  - 
    title: 'lactose intolerance'
    date: '2017-08-26'
    body: |
      Turns out I'm lactose intolerant. Not feeling so hot.
      Current mood: :(

about:
  body: |
    I love cheese!
    This is my blog about eating a lot of cheese.

You could share your love of cheese with the following:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml -e @mycheeseblog.yml

There is also a 'hidden' option to purge the contents of the target director first. To do that, run with:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml -e @mycheeseblog.yml -e purge=true

To add a new blog post, update the blog_posts parameter and re-run the playbook. Though it is idempotent and there is no harm in running the full thing each time, you can generate just new posts and save some time by using the posts tag:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml -e @mycheeseblog.yml --tags posts

Finally, I included a role I use to deploy apache on RPM based systems. If you are using something else, or don't require a webserver, you can remove it from the playbook, or just skip it with tags:

$ ansible-playbook -i hosts site.yml -e @mycheeseblog.yml --skip-tags apache

fork it

This spits out a minimalistic website that suits my tastes, but obviously everyone is different. Think of this playbook as a starting point, providing some of the plumbing to deploy static sites. Take it, mess with the templates and style sheets and all that and do your thing.