Neon is a static site generator built by me and for me.

To install, you must have the Go toolchain installed at version 1.11 or later.

1. go build (or GO111MODULE=on go build if you've cloned this directory into your $GOPATH)
2. mv ./neon $SOMEWHERE_IN_PATH

Neon projects have a file called neon.yaml in their root. Neon commands run in any subdirectory of the project root will be run against the project. The neon.yaml file for my blog currently looks like this (check out ./config/config.go for marginally more information about the configuration options):

theme: default
live_reload_port: 8081
title: Craig Weber
description: "My blog; mostly tech"
author: Craig Weber
theme_config: # these params are only passed into the theme templates
  site_title: Craig Weber
  copyright: Craig Weber 2016
  contact:
    - url: http://twitter.com/weberc2
      text: Twitter
    - url: http://github.com/weberc2
      text: Github
  analytics_url: https://azd7mnx3pk.execute-api.us-east-2.amazonaws.com
index_page_size: 10
site_root: https://weberc2.github.io
code_highlight_theme: friendly

Ok, now we have our neon.yaml file--we should also make a ./posts directory with our posts represented as individual markdown files. These markdown files should have some frontmatter, such as:

---
Title: Deploying Go apps on Docker scratch images
Date: 2018-11-04
---

Title and Date are pretty important, but you can hang other metadata off of this too.

Lastly, you should have a ./themes directory with your themes. You can start by checking out ./themes/mono. Themes are just Go templates. The theme_config from the neon.yaml file gets passed, so you have to make sure the theme_config is populated as required by the theme.

Ok, so now that we've initialized a neon project, we should try to build it. That much is easy, it's just neon build from anywhere in project. This will create an $NEON_PROJECT_ROOT/_output/ directory if none exists and dump the files there. Note that if the output directory already exists, neon build will overwrite files, but it will not delete any deleted or renamed posts. In lieu of that, the best practice is to delete the whole output directory before running neon build.

The output directory is ready-to-serve. Because I deploy to BitBucket pages (a git repo), I just rm -r $TARGET_REPO_ROOT/* followed by cp -r $NEON_PROJECT_ROOT/* $TARGET_REPO_ROOT and then I push the repo to publish it.

Running neon serve in your project directory will run a local development server on port 8080. This is not a production server. It takes a --port flag if you want to override the default port.