CopperSmith
A simple static site builder using markdown
Overview
CopperSmith is a very simple static site builder that uses markdown files, primarily built for myself to quickly roll out documentation (default theme).
Using simple commands, you can quickly scaffold your site leaving you to simply edit the content of your pages.
Once built, the site can be hosted anywhere static HTML content is supported, like GitHub Pages and Netlify. It’s perfect for shared hosting and systems where you don’t have account privileges.
This very site was built using CopperSmith
The structure of a site is laid out to be easy to maintain and looks like the following:
- [sourcePath]/pages/
- _snippets
- getting-started/
- _snippets/
- intro.md
- root/
- _snippets/
- welcome.md
- index.md
Apart from the home page ([sourcePath]/pages/index.md), all other pages are contained in folders / collections. The root collection will contain the root pages i.e. domain.com/page. Any other collections will contain the pages for sub-pages i.e. domain.com/collection/page.
CopperSmith applies a custom permalink pattern to files, and renames them so that they’re nested properly for static sites (converting getting-started/intro.md into getting-started/intro/index.html)
So when the site is rendered, the structure will look like the following:
- [buildPath]/
- getting-started/
- intro/
- index.html
- welcome/
- index.html
- index.html