ducttape

NIH utility for generating static html pages from a bunch of Django templates without need to setup a full Django project.

I created it to help me prototype my web apps using Django Template Language.

Needs a unix like environment. I don't know what will happen to it on MS Windows.

Installation

Install using pip

pip install git+https://github.com/mnazim/ducttape.git

Quick Start

Follow the commands:

$ mkdir ducttape-demo
$ cd ducttape-demo
$ ducttape init
Initializing...
Done

init creates directory structure:

(ducttape)$ ls
context  output  static  templates

Template files go in templates directory, context data for templates goes inside context directory(e.g, context/users/profile.json is the context for templates/users/profile.html). Generated html files are stored output directory. static directory is for js, css, images, etc.

If you have a context/global.json file, it will be available as context for all templates. Values from global.json can be overridden from per template contexts.

STATIC_URL, set to /static/ and MEDIA_URL, set to /static/media/ are available inside templates automatically.

watch monitors template files for changes and automatically rebuilds site as needed:

$ ducttape watch
Watching...
Building...
    article.html -> output/article.html
    index.html -> output/index.html
    users/mirnazim.html -> output/users/mirnazim.html
    users/index.html -> output/users/index.html
Done

export exports the generated output to a zipfile named output.zip:

$ ducttape export
Building...
    article.html -> output/article.html
    index.html -> output/index.html
    users/mirnazim.html -> output/users/mirnazim.html
    users/index.html -> output/users/index.html
Done
Creating zip archive...
Done

That's it. No configuration; only convention(for now, at least). Wait...

Yes, to serve the generated html files just use the SimpleHTTPServer:

$ cd output
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Or for Python3:

$ python3 -m http.serve