Inert

An experimental static site builder with unambitious goals.

• Be fast
• Allow reading of YAML frontmatter
• Allow queueing of manual URLs for preservation

Install the gem:

gem install inert

Create a few folders:

mkdir static views

And a layout file:

echo "<%= yield %>" > views/layout.erb

And then start the Inert server:

inert

When you're ready to deploy, build the site:

inert build

By default, Inert expects a few things, and should work without configuration. Because it's built on top of Roda, it's very easily extendable, and Inert provides hooks to do this via the Inertfile it will read from your project root at runtime.

# Inertfile
Inert.config do |inert|
   inert.helpers do
     def generator
       "Inert v#{Inert::VERSION}"
     end
   end

  inert.app do
    plugin :h
  end

  inert.routes do |r|
    r.on "employees.html" do
      @employees = [] # Read in actual data here
      view("employees.html.erb")
    end
  end
end

Use asset fingerprinting to enable max-cache times on all your static assets.

# Inertfile
Inert.config do |inert|
  inert.app do
    plugin :timestamp_public
  end

  inert.routes do |r|
    r.timestamp_public
  end
end

And inside your views, use the timestamp_path helper with the name of the file in static/ wherever you'd just use the filename itself:

<img src="<%= timestamp_path "some_image_in_static_folder.png" %>">

Use asset minification to compile and compress all your CSS and JS assets into a single file.

# Inertfile

Inert.config do |inert|
  inert.app do
    plugin :assets, css: %w"text.css layout.css"
    compile_assets if Inert.building?
  end

  inert.routes do |r|
    r.assets
  end
end

And inside your layout, use the assets helper with the name of the asset group:

<%= assets(:css) %>

Make sure you put your assets in assets/group. For the example above, you'd have assets/css/text.css and assets/css/layout.css.

Use the roda-live_reload gem to enable live reloads:

# Gemfile
gem "roda-live_reload"
gem "puma" # Webrick wont' currently work with roda-live_reload


# Inertfile
Inert.config do |inert|
  inert.app do
    plugin :live_reload if Inert.development?
  end

  inert.routes do |r|
    r.live_reload if Inert.development?
  end
end

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/adam12/inert.

I love pull requests! If you fork this project and modify it, please ping me to see if your changes can be incorporated back into this project.

That said, if your feature idea is nontrivial, you should probably open an issue to discuss it before attempting a pull request.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.