LuaWebGen - static website generator, powered by Lua. Somewhat inspired by Hugo.

Webpages are generated using HTML and Markdown templates with embedded Lua code. CSS files can also include code.

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• Why?
• Example
• Installation / Usage
  • Windows
  • Universal
  • Build Website
• Documentation

The rant: After using Hugo for a little while I got fed up with how annoying it was to add custom functionality (everything has to be a template), how "content" and "static" files were treated differently, how CSS files were excluded from the templating system, how you couldn't display data from the data folder easily on pages, how confusing index files were, and other silly things.

Being a programmer, I thought treating all files equally and enabling the use of an actual programming language would solve most of these problems.

A blog post, my-first-post.md:

{{
page.title = "The First!"
local foot = "not hand"
}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
Duis nec justo mollis, varius nulla sed, commodo nibh.

Foot is {{ foot }}<br>
1 + 2 * 3 = {{ 1+2*3 }}<br>
Current year is {{ os.date"%Y" }}

## List of Cats

{{ for i, cat in ipairs(data.myCats) }}
- Cat {{ i }} is named {{ cat.name }}.
{{ end }}

![Cute cat]({{ getCatImageUrl() }})

Page layout template, page.html:

{{ include"header" }}
{{ include"navigation" }}

<main>
	<h1 id="{{ urlize(page.title) }}">{{ page.title }}</h1>
	{{ page.content }}
</main>

{{ include"footer" }}

See more examples in the examples folder.

There are two versions of LuaWebGen: Windows and universal. Begin by downloading and unzipping the program somewhere.

Just run webgen.exe, like this:

cd path/to/siteroot
path/to/webgen.exe command [options]

If you add the program folder to your PATH it's a bit nicer:

cd path/to/siteroot
webgen command [options]

Note: The documentation uses this format.

This version requires these things to be installed:

• Lua 5.1
• LuaFileSystem - required for file system access.

Some functionality also require these things:

• Lua-GD - required for image manipulation.
• LuaSocket - optional, for more CPU-friendly auto-builds.

Hint: On Windows you can simply install Lua for Windows which includes everything that's needed in a neat package.

Run the program like this:

cd path/to/siteroot
lua path/to/webgen.lua command [options]

Note: LuaWebGen has only been tested on Windows so far.

To generate a new empty website, run something like this from the command line:

webgen new site "my-website"
cd "my-website"
webgen new page "blog/first-post.md"
webgen build

LuaWebGen uses this folder structure for a website project:

my-website/             -- Root of the website project.
    content/            -- All website content, including pages, images, CSS and JavaScript files.
        index.(html|md) -- Homepage/root index page.
    data/               -- Optional data folder. Can contain Lua, TOML, JSON and XML files.
    layouts/            -- All HTML layout templates.
        page.html       -- Default page layout template.
    output/             -- Where the built website ends up.
    scripts/            -- Optional Lua script folder. Scripts must return a function.
    config.lua          -- Site-wide configurations.

Everything in the content folder will be processed and end up in the output folder.

See the website for the full documentation.