Readme.md

   1 # Readme
   2
   3 ## Overview
   4
   5 BiaWeb2 is a static site generator written in C++, that takes a directory tree
   6 of documents (in Markdown format - more on that later) and outputs a website
   7 with the same tree structure, based on a set of templates.
   8
   9 BiaWeb2 supports infinite nesting level of source sub-directories, with
  10 each directory representing a "category". Thus, a website can have (say)
  11 a structure like
  12
  13     + Home
  14     + ----- Blog
  15     + ------+------ Travel
  16     + ------+------ History
  17     + ------+------ Personal
  18     + ------+------ Technology
  19     + ----- Creative
  20     + ------+------ Reviews
  21     + ------+------ +------- Books
  22     + ------+-------+--------+-------- Fiction
  23     + ------+-------+--------+-------- Non-fiction
  24     + ----- Miscellaneous
  25
  26 Thus the entire structure of the website is represented by the filesystem
  27 hierarchy of directories (which I think is an intuitive way of organizing
  28 categories).
  29
  30 `biaweb2` is a command-line program that performs the entire website
  31 generation in one step. The usage is:
  32
  33     biaweb2 -i <inputdir> -o <outputdir> -t <templatedir> [-q]
  34
  35 Where `<inputdir>` is the input directory, `<outputdir>` is the destination
  36 directory and `<templatedir>` is the location of the template files. The
  37 `templates` directory in the __biaweb2__ source package provides a default
  38 template that can be further customized to suit your needs. The main philosophy
  39 of BiaWeb2 is to be as configuration-free as possible and hence most of the
  40 customization for a specific website is within the templates themselves. The
  41 option `-q` is quiet-mode, to suppress the messages.
  42
  43 ## Getting and compiling BiaWeb2
  44
  45 BiaWeb2 works on *nix-like operating systems.
  46
  47 To get BiaWeb2, clone the git repository (from the command line)
  48
  49     git clone https://gitlab.com/harishankarv/biaweb2.git
  50
  51 To compile you require the following dependencies and a C++ compiler. Check your
  52 distribution package manager for more information
  53
  54 * libmarkdown2-dev or equivalent package
  55    ([discount](https://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/))
  56 * libfmt-dev or equivalent package ([fmt](https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt))
  57 * scons ([scons](https://scons.org/))
  58
  59 Once you have got the dependencies, compile using scons from inside the
  60 source directory of BiaWeb2 wherein you had cloned the repository
  61
  62     cd biaweb2/
  63     scons
  64
  65 If successful, you should get an executable file `biaweb2` in the same directory
  66 If not, check whether you have installed all the requirements.