Skip to content

README.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
90 lines (59 loc) · 2.49 KB

README.md

File metadata and controls

90 lines (59 loc) · 2.49 KB
Raw

Rust Static Site Generator (SSG)

Lightweight and fast CLI tool written in Rust that recursively scans a directory of Markdown files, extractcs YAML frontmatter, converts the Markdown to HTML, and generate a fully linked static website while preserving your folder structure.

Features

  • Recursive Directory Traversal: Scans deeply nested folders to find every .md file.
  • Frontmatter Parsing: Extracts YAML metadata (Title, Date, Description) from the top of Markdown files.
  • Markdown to HTML: Uses pulldown-cmark for highly compliant, fast Markdown parsing.
  • Structure Mirroring: Automatically replicates your input directory's folder tree inside the output directory.
  • HTML Templating: Wraps the generated HTML inside a standard web document structure.

Prerequisites

You will need Rust and Cargo installed on your machine to run this project.

Installation

Clone the repository and build the project using Cargo:

git clone https://github.com/ansh3108/markdown-cli.git
cd markdown-cli
cargo build --release

Usage

The CLI requires two arguments: the input directory containing your Markdown files, and the output directory where you want the HTML output to be saved.

#Run via cargo:
cargo run -- ./content ./public

# Or run the compiled binary directly:
./target/release/my_ssg ./content ./public

Markdown File Format

For the parser to work correctly, every Markdown file must include YAML frontmatter enclosed in --- at the very top of the file.

The frontmatter expects three fields: title,date, and description.

Example content/hello-world.md:

---
title: My First Rust Post
date: "2026-08-06"
description: Learning how to build a Static Site Generator
---

# Hello from Rust!

This is a paragraph of **Markdown** text. 

* Here is a list item
* Here is another one

Directory Mirrorring

The tool will respect your folder hirarchy. If you structure input like this:

content/
├── index.md
└── blog/
    └── my-post.md

The output will automatically generate the corresponding folders:

public/
├── index.html
└── blog/
    └── my-post.html

Dependencies

  • serde&serde_yaml: For deserializing YAML frontmatter into Rust structs.
  • pulldown-cmark: A fast, CommonMark-compliant Markdown parser.
image