Broccoli Static Site JSON

A Simple Broccoli plugin that parses collections of markdown
files and exposes them as JSON:API documents in the output tree, under the
specified paths. It also supports the use of
front-matter to define meta-data for each markdown
file.

It is used for the following official Ember Documentation projects:
- Ember Guides App
- Ember Deprecations App

Basic Usage

const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson(folder)

The most basic use, of this Broccoli plugin, is to generate a tree of JSON files from a folder filled
with markdown files. The most common usage would be to call StaticSiteJson on a content folder
like this: const contentJsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('content').

Important notes about default behaviour:
- The name of the folder will be the default type for the JSON:API document.
- The type will automatically be pluralized, so if you use the above content folder the type will
be contents.
- Using front-matter you can define the ID or the Title attribute of the content. Any other
attributes must be defined in configuration.

By default the plugin also looks for a pages.yml that exposes it as a JSON:API document named
pages.json in the output path. As the name suggests, this JSON file is quite useful to build a
Table of Contents in the consuming application.

How to integrate into an Ember app

We use an in-repo addon to give ourselves the flexibility to add prember & fastboot later.

Prember allows you to pre-render any list of URLs into static HTML files at build time using Ember Fastboot. Prember is recommended if you are trying to deploy an Ember-based static site using broccoli-static-site-json.

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Generate the in-repo addon:

``bash
ember generate in-repo-addon content-generator
`

It will create a new directory lib/content-generator with two files: index.js and package.json.

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Update the index.js file and add your broccoli-static-site-json implementation, then expose the resulting tree using the treeForPublic hook.

#### Example

`javascript
'use strict';

const StaticSiteJson = require('broccoli-static-site-json');

const contentsJson = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
contentFolder: 'contents',
collate: true,
});

module.exports = {
name: require('./package').name,

isDevelopingAddon() {
return true;
},

treeForPublic() {
return contentsJson;
}
};
`

Note: we need to add the contentFolder: 'contents' config because ember-data expects the folder name to be pluralised and broccoli-static-site-json does not do this by default.

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Then in your Ember application, generate an application adapter:

`bash
ember generate adapter application
`

and update the contents to match the following example:

`javascript
import DS from 'ember-data';

export default DS.JSONAPIAdapter.extend({
urlForFindAll(modelName) {
const path = this.pathForType(modelName);
return /${path}/all.json;
},

urlForFindRecord(id, modelName) {
const path = this.pathForType(modelName);
return /${path}/${id}.json;
}
});
`

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Now we need to generate a Model so that we can request the data in a route:

`bash
ember generate model content
`

This content name matches the example we used above when using the StaticSiteJson() broccoli plugin.

Now you are able to query your data in an Ember Route:

`javascript
import Route from '@ember/routing/route';

export default Route.extend({
model() {
return this.store.findAll('content');
}
});
`

Detailed documentation

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By default this plugin assumes the only attribute available on the front-matter is title. You
can configure what attributes you want exposed in the JSON:API output by simply adding the
attributes config value as follows:

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
attributes: ['title', 'subtitle', 'index'],
});
`

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By default this plugin will use the name of the folder that you're building as the _JSON:API type_ for example if you had the following configuration:

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('author');
`

it would load the markdown in the folder author and each JSON:API document would have a type of authors.

If you want to specify the type directly you can in the options:

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('really-strange_placeToPut_some_FILES', {
type: 'author'
});
`

Note: just like the folder example the type will be automatically pluralised.

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If you want to have the ability to query all of your content at once you can do
that by collating content together in a collection. This will place all of
your markdown files into a single JSON:API document and can be used for
findAll queries. To turn on collation you just need to set the collate
attribute to true

`javascript
new StaticSiteJson(content, {
collate: true,
})
`

* collate: Boolean - Default: false

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If you have turned on collation by default BroccoliStaticSiteJson will output
the collated documents with the file name all.json. If you want to be able to
edit this default output file you can set the collationFileName.

`javascript
new StaticSiteJson(content, {
collate: true,
collationFileName: 'articles.json'
})
`

* collationFileName: String - Default: all.json

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In most cases when you're using BroccoliStaticSiteJson you probably will not be
dealing with collections that are too large. But in some cases, for example a
blog, you want to be able to deal with collections of an arbitrary length and it
would be useful to paginate your collated collections. To enable pagination you
set paginate to be true in your options:

`javascript
new StaticSiteJson(content, {
collate: true,
paginate: true,
})
`

Note: paginate will do nothing if you haven't set collate to true.

This will produce a series of files in your output tree:

`
content/all.json
content/all-0.json
content/all-1.json
content/all-2.json
content/all-3.json
...
`

Each of these files makes use of the JSON:API spec's pagination
meta and will have links
entries for first, last, next, and prev as appropriate.

Note: the contents of content/all.json and content/all-0.json are
exactly the same. This is provided for simplicity and backwards
compatibility when querying paginated collections.

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By default, if you have turned on pagination, BroccoliStaticSiteJson will use a
page size of 10 entries per file. If you want to change the page size then you
can set the pageSize in the options:

`javascript
new StaticSiteJson(content, {
collate: true,
paginate: true,
pageSize: 20,
})
`

Note: pageSize will do nothing if paginate is missing or set to false.

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When paginating the order of the items in each page becomes very important, and
will be highly dependent on your specific use case. For example, if you are
using BroccoliStaticSiteJson for a blogging platform you will most likely want
to order the posts by date and from latest to oldest.

For this reason you can define a paginateSortFunction() that will be passed as
a compareFunction into
Array.sort().
The full list of items will be sorted before they are chunked into pages. Here
is a simplified example taken from what is used in
empress-blog to sort posts by date:

`javascript
const contentTree = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
attributes: ['date'], // this is simplified for the example
collate: true,
paginate: true,
paginateSortFunction(a, b) {
return b.date - a.date;
}
});
`

Note: you can only sort based on attributes that have been defined in your
attributes parameter. id is always available and is the name of the file
by default.

Note: paginateSortFunction() does nothing if paginate is not true;

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One of the things that differentiates this Broccoli Plugin from some of the other approaches of
accessing Markdown, from an Ember application, is that because we are generating JSON:API compatible
JSON files we are able to make use of real relationships.

To define a relationship you just need to provide a references configuration to the StaticSiteJson
options, which works in the same way as attributes. The only difference is that front-matter value
for a reference is added to the relationships definition of the JSON:API document.

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
references: ['author'],
});
`

You can also optionally define a custom type for a relationship by providing the references configuration an object with a type property and a name property. In this way, the name of the relationship can differ from its specified type.

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
references: ['author', { name: 'blog', type: 'post' }],
});
`

Note, you can combine relationships defined as strings and relationships with custom types defined as objects.

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By default this plugin ouputs the Markdown in two formats: the original contents of the Markdown
file, under the content attribute, and an HTML version of the file under the attribute html. If you
do not need the original Markdown in production then you can remove it from the output by
specifying the content types:

`javascript
const jsonTree = new StaticSiteJson('content', {
contentTypes: ['html'],
});
`

#### Available content types

- content - _default_
- Contains the full contents of the Markdown file
- html - _default_
- Contains a simple html representation of the Markdown file
- description - _optional_
- Contains the first 260 characters of the content of the file
- toc` - _optional_
- Contains an array of each heading of in the Markdown file, which can be used to make an internal Table of Contents for that page

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This plugin uses showdown to render markdown. right now we only support,
global configuration of showdown, please see https://github.com/showdownjs/showdown#options
for more details.