Preprocessors

Turn files into dictionaries.

Introduction

Skua's preprocessors allow you to convert static files into dictionaries, before you use a templating engine to convert these files into HTML files.

If you imagine a static site generator to be like a compiler, dictionaries are Skua's internal language, to which everything must be converted before it can be rendered as an HTML file.

Config objects

Often websites have global variables such as the site name, site author, branding, etc. Instead of writing these global variables into every file, it is easier to just specify them once. Skua allows you to pass a skua.preprocessors.Config object to preprocessors. The Config class needs to be initialized with a dictionary in the format {"variable_name":"value"}. All keys in the dictionary will be available to all templates.

Config objects can also be initialized using the from_file class method. The file specified must be a JSON file.

from pathlib import Path
from skua.preprocessors import Config
config = Config.from_file(Path('file_path.json'))

Useful keys you might want to set

• template – if you want to render all pages using the same template, then you can specify it in the config object. Note that template names should be specified without the extension, so if the template you want to use is called skua_blogpost.html you'd write skua_blogpost. Note that currently keys from Config objects override keys specified in frontmatter (although this will most likely change).
• site_name – this is the name of the site. If you are writing your own templates, then you can use a different variable name for this variable. By convention, this variable name is used.

Example code

• Using the MarkdownPreprocessor

  from skua.preprocessors.markdown import MarkdownPreprocessor
  from skua.preprocessors import Config
  md_preprocessor = MarkdownPreprocessor(Config({'site_name': 'My New Website!'}))