🔥 hotstuff

A composable, incremental, turnkey document compiler

Read the blog post: AM010 - On Tolerating Complexity

hotstuff is turnkey — it makes almost no assumptions about how you structure or write your content. There's also no plugins whatsoever.

hotstuff is composable — touch a few files in your existing folder structure and it'll just work. Near zero-cost, and your content is always fully portable.

hotstuff is incremental —- it aggressively caches your project so you can use it on hundreds of thousands of files.

Just one command away:

Cargo: cargo install --git https://github.com/AbstractMachinesLab/hotstuff --branch main
Yarn: yarn global add @abstractmachines/hotstuff
NPM: npm install --global @abstractmachines/hotstuff

Getting Started

If you put a hotstuff-project file on the root of your project, hotstuff will look throughout your whole project for site files.

site files tell hotstuff that this particular folder should be compiled into a website.

So if you have your posts in the following structure:

my/website λ tree
.
├── pages
│   ├── First-post.md
│   └── Some-other-post.md
└── sections
    ├── about.md
    ├── hire-me.md
    └── projects.md

You just need to touch a few files:

my/website λ touch hotstuff-project
my/website λ touch pages/site sections/site

And you can run hotstuff serve to compile the website using the same tree structure under a _public folder, and serve it with hot-reloading.

my/website λ hotstuff serve
11:19:09 INFO :: Building project...
11:19:09 INFO :: Built 9 artifacts in 6ms
11:19:09 INFO :: Done in 7ms
11:19:09 INFO :: Server listening on http://0.0.0.0:4000

Now your file structure looks like:

my/website  λ tree
.
├── _public
│   ├── pages
│   │   ├── First-post.html
│   │   └── Some-other-post.html
│   └── sections
│       ├── about.html
│       ├── hire-me.html
│       └── projects.html
├── hotstuff-project
├── pages
│   ├── First-post.md
│   ├── Some-other-post.md
│   └── site
└── sections
    ├── about.md
    ├── hire-me.md
    ├── projects.md
    └── site

Note that the _public folder is ready for you to serve however you feel like. Upload to S3, Now, GCS, Github pages, or wherever really.

Installation

NPM

If you're already running npm or yarn, you can just run yarn global add @abstractmachines/hotstuff or npm install -g @abstractmachines/hotstuff to get the right binary in your computer.

If you're running against the Github package registry, our scoped name is @abstractmachineslab instead.

Source

You can install it locally via source if you have a running Rust toolchain with:

curl https://codeload.github.com/AbstractMachinesLab/hotstuff/tar.gz/main > hotstuff.tar.gz
tar xzf main.tar.gz
cd hotstuff
make install

Then hotstuff should be available globally.

Features

Incremental Builds

Running hotstuff build will plan a build of your entire site every time, but it will only execute the bits required to get you to your end state.

There is no in-memory build state, and instead build plan diffing is implemented on top of the artifacts that are produced.

You can always call hotstuff build --force to skip the diffing and redo al the work.

Local Server

You can run hotstuff serve to start up a static file server with incremental compilation and hot-reloading.

There's no in-memory build state, and the build diffs are recomputed in the background for you. So you get a re-build within a few milliseconds of changing a file, and the browser will only reload the assets that changed.

It doesn't get anymore turnkey than this.

Templating

You'll quickly notice that the bare compilation from Markdown to HTML doesn't quite fit all use-cases. To alleviate this hotstuff lets you specify in your site file a template file to be used for all the Markdown files within that specific site.

Say you wanted to wrap all of the pages from the example above in a common markup: add a <meta charset="utf-8"> to all of them. You'd write a template file:

<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
  </head>
  <body>
    {| document |}
  </body>
</html>

And in your site file you'd point to it:

(template "path/to/template.html")

Voila! That's all it takes to get the templating up and running.

Assets

To copy assets (any supporting file to your site) you can use the (assets ...) rule:

(assets
  style.css
  logo.svg
  bg_music.midi)

And they will be automatically copied from their location, relative to the site file.

You can also use the shorthand . instead of listing your assets to have all the files in the folder copied over. This is not recursive.

Credits

hotstuff is inspired by prior art:

the cactus static site generator
the dune build system, with its composability
the bazel build system, with its aggressive incremental compilation techniques

If you'd like to support this project you can sponsor us on Github.

Cheap and reliable Node.js hosting starts at $3/month, and $1/month static HTML hosting

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