Webby and Static Web Sites

I was trying to figure out recently how to build a static site with Ramaze and didn't really come up with anything, but someone pointed me in the direction of Webby that's designed with just this use case in mind. It seems pretty cool, so I thought I'd document how to get it up and running on Ubuntu.

First I tried just doing a gem install, but that didn't work because I'm using ruby 1.9.2 so ...

rvm install 1.8.7

to get the right ruby (assuming you're using rvm to manage this). Then, you'll need to set the correct ruby with

rvm 1.8.7

to add the following gems for ruby 1.8.7


gem install webby
gem install RedCloth


The RedCloth gem is needed for the default, but if you decide to use a different templating system, you don't need to install it.

OK, let's create a web site now.

webby-gen website my_site

There should now be a directory called my_site with a few different directories. Now you can

cd my_site
webby


and this should create a new directory called output with some HTML files and the css for the site. If you modify the file index.txt in the content directory, and then rerun the webby command, you should see the output/index.html change.

Since you've been reading this blog, you probably have a pretty good idea of how templating works, so there really shouldn't be too much here that you haven't seen in general even if you haven't looked at the RedCloth templating. webby also supports a number of other templating systems that you can use by setting a filter in the content file. This is documented in the User Manual.

To be honest, I just started looking at this today, so I'm not sure how much help I'm going to be with questions, but let me know if you have any and I'll give them a shot.