Ursus

Ursus is the static site generator used by All About Berlin and my personal website. It turns Markdown files and Jinja templates into a static website.

It also renders images in different sizes, renders SCSS, minifies JS and generates Lunr.js search indexes.

This project is in active use and development.

What's different

You can use Jinja {% include %} tags and {{ variables }} inside your Markdown content. This lets you insert constants and embed components inside your content. For example, I use it to insert a table of contents, calculators and constants in my content.
It transforms images and supports imgsrc and srcset out of the box, so responsive images are easy to implement. It can also create PDF thumbnails, and can be extended to transform other files.
You can build linters for your content. The default linters check if internal links and related entries exist. It's easy to write your own linters.
It's very extensible. You can add your own context processors, renderers and linters. You are not stuck with Markdown and Jinja. You can also create your own Markdown extensions.
It's relatively fast. All About Berlin and its hundreds of pages builds in 5 seconds on an M2 Macbook Air. Live reloads take around 400ms. It was originally built to run smoothly on a much older laptop.

Setup

Installation

Install Ursus with pipx:

pipx install ursus-ssg

Alternatively install with pip:

pip install ursus-ssg

Getting started

Call ursus to generate a static website. Call ursus --help to see the command line options it supports.

By default, Ursus looks for 3 directories, relative to the current directory:

It looks for content in ./content
It looks for page templates in ./templates
It generates a static website in ./output

For example, create a markdown file and save it as ./content/posts/first-post.md.

---
title: Hello world!
description: This is an example page
date_created: 2022-10-10
---

## Hello beautiful world

*This* is a template. Pretty cool eh?

Then, create a page template and save it as ./templates/posts/entry.html.jinja.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>{{ entry.title }}</title>
    <meta name="description" content="{{ entry.description }}">
</head>
<body>
    {{ entry.body }}

    Created on {{ entry.date_created }}
</body>
</html>

Your project should now look like this:

my-website/ <- You are here
├─ content/
│  └─ posts/
│     └─ first-post.md
└─ templates/
   └─ posts/
      └─ entry.html.jinja

Call ursus to generate a statuc website. It will create ./output/posts/first-post.html.

Configuring Ursus

To configure Ursus, create a configuration file.

# Example Ursus config file
# Find all configuration options in `ursus/config.py`.
from ursus.config import config

config.content_path = Path(__file__).parent / 'blog'
config.templates_path = Path(__file__).parent / 'templates'
config.output_path = Path(__file__).parent.parent / 'dist'

config.site_url = 'https://allaboutberlin.com'

config.minify_js = True
config.minify_css = True

If you call your configuration file ursus_config.py, Ursus loads it automatically.

my-website/
├─ ursus_config.py
├─ content/
└─ templates/

You can also load a configuration file with the -c argument.

ursus -c /path/to/ursus_config.py

Watching for changes

Ursus can rebuild your website when the content or templates change.

# Rebuild when content or templates change
ursus -w
ursus --watch

It can only rebuild the pages that changed. This is much faster, but it does not work perfectly.

# Only rebuild the pages that changed
ursus -wf
ursus --watch --fast

Serving the website

Ursus can serve the website it generates. This is useful for testing.

# Serve the static website on port 80
ursus -s
ursus --serve 80

This is not meant for production. Use nginx, Caddy or some other static file server for that.

How Ursus works

Context processors generate the context used to render templates. The context is just a big dictionary that represent your site's entire content. Usually, each content file is turned into an entry.
Renderers use the context and the templates to render the parts of the final website: pages, thumbnails, static assets, etc.

Content

Content is what fills your website: text, images, videos, PDFs. Content is usually rendered to create a working website. Some content (like Markdown files) is rendered with Templates, and other (like images) is converted to a different file format.

Ursus looks for content in ./content, unless you change config.content_path.

Entries

A single piece of content is called an Entry. This can be a single image, a single markdown file, etc.

Each Entry has a URI. This is the Entry's unique identifier. The URI is the Entry's path relative to the content directory. For example, the URI of ./content/posts/first-post.md is posts/first-post.md.

Context

The Context contains the information needed to render your website. It's just a big dictionary, and you can put anything in it.

context['entries'] contains is a dictionary of all your entries. The key is the Entry URI.

Context processors each add specific data to the context. For example, MarkdownProcessor adds your .md content to context.entries.

# Example context
{
    'entries': {
        'posts/first-post.md': {
            'title': 'Hello world!',
            'description': 'This is an example page',
            'date_created': datetime(2022, 10, 10),
            'body': '<h2>Hello beautiful world</h2><p>...',
        },
        'posts/second-post.md': {
            # ...
        },
    },
    # Context processors can add more things to the context
    'blog_title': 'Example blog',
    'site_url': 'https://example.com/blog',
}

Templates

Templates are used to render your Content. They are the theme of your website. Jinja templates, Javascript, CSS and theme images belong in the templates directory.

Ursus looks for templates in ./templates, unless you change config.templates_path.

Renderers

Renderers use the Context and the Templates to generate parts of your static website. For example, JinjaRenderer renders Jinja templates, ImageTransformRenderer converts and resizes your images, and StaticAssetRenderer copies your static assets.

Output

This is the final static website generated by Ursus. Ursus generates a static website in ./output, unless you change config.output_path.

The content of the output directory is ready to be served by any static file server.

How context processors work

Context processors transform the context, which is a dict with information about each of your Entries.

Context processors ignore file and directory names that start with . or _. For example, ./content/_drafts/hello.md and ./content/posts/_post-draft.md are ignored.

MarkdownProcessor

The MarkdownProcessor creates context for all .md files in content_path. The markdown content is in the body attribute.

{
    'entries': {
        'posts/first-post.md': {
            'title': 'Hello world!',
            'description': 'This is an example page',
            'date_created': datetime(2022, 10, 10),
            'body': '<h2>Hello beautiful world</h2><p>...',
        },
        # ...
    },
}

It makes a few changes to the default markdown output:

Put the front matter in the context
- related_* keys are replaced by a list of related entry dicts
- date_ keys are converted to datetime objects
- Other attributes are added to the entry object.
Use responsive images based on config.image_transforms settings.
<img> are converted to <figure> or <picture> tags when appropriate.
Images are lazy-loaded with the loading=lazy attribute.
Jinja tags ({{ ... }} and {% ... %}) are rendered as-is. You can use {% include %} and {{ variables }} in your content.

GetEntriesProcessor

The GetEntriesProcessor adds a get_entries method to the context. It's used to get a list of entries of a certain type, and sort it.

{% set posts = get_entries('posts', filter_by=filter_function, sort_by='date_created', reverse=True) %}

{% for post in posts %}
...

GitDateProcessor

Adds the date_updated attribute to all Entries. It uses the file's last commit date.

{
    'entries': {
        'posts/first-post.md': {
            'date_updated': datetime(2022, 10, 10),
            # ...
        },
        # ...
    },
}

ImageProcessor

Adds images and PDFs Entries to the context. Dimensions and image transforms are added to each Entry. Use in combination with config.image_transforms.

{
    'entries': {
        'images/hello.jpg': {
            'width': 320,
            'height': 240,
            'image_transforms': [
                {
                    'is_default': True,
                    'input_mimetype': 'image/jpeg',
                    'output_mimetype': 'image/webp',
                    # ...
                },
                # ...
            ]
        },
        # ...
    },
}

How renderers work

Renderers use context and templates to generate parts of the static website.

A Generator takes your Content and your Templates and produces an Output. It's a recipe to turn your content into a final result. The default StaticSiteGenerator generates a static website. You can write your own Generator to out

Ursus

Install / Use

README

Ursus

What's different

Setup

Installation

Getting started

Configuring Ursus

Watching for changes

Serving the website

How Ursus works

Content

Entries

Context

Templates

Renderers

Output

How context processors work

MarkdownProcessor

GetEntriesProcessor

GitDateProcessor

ImageProcessor

How renderers work