Saturday, November 18
App::WRT - WRiting Tool, a static site generator and related utilities
Probably a decade after the first time I put it on a TODO list, I finally got
around to publishing this site’s underlying software on CPAN. It
didn’t used to be called App::WRT; for a long time it was just display.pl,
and then Display.pm when I turned it into (sort of) a library.
Last February, I switched it from CGI that ran server-side
on every page request to a site generator that would render the entire site to
static HTML files. That July, after agonizing about
good command names not already taken by real software, I switched the
command-line interface from display to wrt, short for writing
tool. CPAN naming guidelines suggest putting this sort of thing in the
App namespace, so that’s what I did.
CPAN is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a big repository of libraries, utilities, and documentation in Perl. Which is to say that it’s Perl’s answer to npm, Packagist, RubyGems, PyPI, etc. (It would probably be more accurate to say those things are other languages' answer to CPAN, since CPAN dates to the mid-1990s.)
I’ve generally had a bad experience with language-specific package management
systems, but after all these years CPAN remains an exception, for all of its
foibles. Publishing a release to CPAN turns out to be a very 1990s / early
2000s kind of experience, with a wait to see results and a generally piecemeal
feeling. It suffers by comparison to the “push a git tag to the remote”
approach to creating a “release” on GitHub. On the other hand, it pushed me to
make a bunch of improvements to the documentation and fill out a handful of the
features that wrt needs to be usable as a standalone tool.
🌲
I know no one else will ever use this thing. In case you did want to, installing on most GNU/Linux systems should be as simple as running:
$ sudo cpan -i App::WRT
Or, if you happen to have cpanm installed:
$ sudo cpanm App::WRT
Once installed, you should be able to run wrt:
$ wrt
wrt - a writing tool
Usage: /usr/local/bin/wrt [command] [args]
wrt init Initialize a wrt repository
wrt display Print HTML for entries
wrt render-all Render all defined entries to filesystem
wrt addprop Add a property to an entry
wrt findprop Find entries containing certain properties
wrt -h Print this help message
You must specify a command.
In order to make an entry for the current day, create a file like
archives/2017/9/18, and write some HTML in it. Or use Markdown, like so:
<h1>Saturday, November 18</>
<markdown>
Your text here.
</markdown>If I live long enough, I might get around to rewriting wrt in something else, but aside from C, I’m not sure I could have started out by picking a language more boringly likely than Perl to keep working for a couple of decades.
The underlying archive format could be better in some ways, but so far it’s also been fairly future-proof. My only real worry is that one of these days, as the open web vanishes further into the maw of facegooglemazon, HTML itself may start to seem like a bad idea. In that case, however, it should be pretty easy to convert the simple subset of HTML I’m using here to some other language.