About
Write an express app, output static files.
If you want an existing implementation, we conviently made a Yeoman generator for you.
$ npm install -g generator-express-static
What makes an express-static project?
express-static is basically an implementation of a few components that allow us to generate a static website while having the feeling of "just writing an expressjs application. If you are asking yourself "This doesn't really do much", then you are right on point with the goals of this project.
We want you to have the feeling of freedom of just writing a dynamic web application, while still being able to pump a static site.
Why?
At meltmedia, we write a lot of gigantic static websites. These projects quickly become too large for most static site generators. We do not need most of the features of the current availble options, and we wanted to make something we could mold to every project that may come up. Why write plugins when you can just use the thousands of node modules?
If it works with express, it will have a really good chance of working with this project.
Problems this project solves
- A lot of static site generators are a whole framework. We don't want that. We want you to choose the tools you need.
- A lot of static site generators do not scale to websites with hundreds of pages
The three major components are:
A web application framework for node
javascript test runner that we use to make requests to our express app.
A small piece of code that sits inside express's res.send function. It captures the route that was called, the body that would be sent to the browser, and writes that result to an html file.
Contributing
The more the better.
Goals of the project
Keep as close to a basic Express application as possible. For example, we do not want to add every templating engine to our Yeoman project, because adding template support to express is pretty trivial. We want you to add what you need. In this sense, code examples and documentation are more important than features.
Things we are interested in?
- We think that the karma test runner is pretty temporary, and want to make light layer for that
- Improve express-writer
- Fix bugs
- DOCUMENTATION
Parts of this project