gem install webgen

Contents

• Welcome to the homepage of webgen!
• Feature requests, bugs, …
• Download & Installation
  • Compatibility Notes
  • Using the repository version
  • Using Rubygems
  • Manual Installation
  • Dependencies
• Author

Support webgen

If you are interested in supporting webgen and would like to contribute, you are welcome to make a small donation using the donate button below - it will surely be appreciated.

Welcome to the homepage of webgen!

webgen is a free (GPL-licensed) command line application for generating static websites. You could write a static website by hand, of course. But by using webgen you have several advantages:

• The page layout is separated from the content: if you change the layout, all pages that use that layout are automatically updated. You can have any number of different layouts and even nested ones.

• Write content in a markup language: The content and layout files can be written in a markup language like Markdown, Textile or Haml which lets you concentrate more on what you write.

• Automation: webgen can automatically generate, for example, menus and breadcrumb trails for you.

• Dynamic content: It is easy to add some dynamic content if there is a need for it.

• Self-Contained websites: webgen websites are self contained since all generated links are relative ones. This allows one to preview a generated site without a web server!

The above list should just give you a glimpse of what is possible with webgen. Have a look at the features page for a more complete list and a feature comparison to other static website generators.

Although webgen is very powerful it is also very easy to use. A basic website can be created in just one step by executing

webgen create mywebsite

This command will create the directory mywebsite which houses the newly created webgen website and some content files to start with. By running the command webgen inside the mywebsite directory, the website will be generated and put into the out directory where it can be viewed with any browser:

cd mywebsite
webgen                # -> creates an out/ directory with the HTML output

Actually, this website was generated with webgen and provides an online demonstration of its features. For example, the menu that you can see at the top was created dynamically. For more information have a look at the documentation!

Feature requests, bugs, …

If you have an idea for a new feature for webgen, request it. If you have found a bug, you should report it here. Also, there are forums and mailing lists available (the mailing list is mirrored to the webgen-users google group) if you have any questions! You can also visit the IRC channel #webgen on Freenode where I can be found whenever I’m online.

Download & Installation

There are currently two versions of webgen:

• The 0.5.x series: This is the new stable series. A completely new implementation of the core allows for advanced features like partial site regeneration. It provides many features out of the box (though currently a bit less than the old 0.4.x series) and is very user friendly.

• The 0.4.x series: This is the old stable series which can still be used but is not updated anymore. The complete documentation (including installation information and needed libraries) for the last version of the 0.4.x series can be found here.

Compatibility Notes

webgen should run on any platform which supports Ruby. It has been successfully tested on the following platforms:

• Linux with Ruby 1.8.6
• Mac OSX with Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.8.7
• Windows XP with latest Ruby 1.8.6 from One-Click-Installer

Furthermore, webgen should also run on jruby 1.1.3 and ruby 1.9.1 but that has not been extensively tested.

Ruby 1.9.1 support notes (as of 2009-02-13):

• All unit tests run fine except those which use libraries that have not been fixed to work with 1.9.1 yet (ie. feedtools).

• The webgen webgui won’t work because one of its dependencies, rack 0.9.1, is not 1.9.1 compatible.

• There may be problems with Maruku and character encodings.

Using the repository version

webgen uses git as its versioning system and webgen’s repository is hosted primarily on Rubyforge but I have also created a clone of it on GitHub. The repositories always contains a clean state of the current development version of webgen, i.e. webgen should always work when checked out from the repository. To check out webgen use one of the following commands:

 git clone git://rubyforge.org/webgen.git
 git clone git://github.com/gettalong/webgen.git

Using Rubygems

If you are using Rubygems, installing the latest version of webgen is as simple as executing

gem install webgen

or, if you want to install the latest version of the old series, just use

gem install webgen -v '< 0.5.0'

After this command has finished, everything is ready for creating websites. Be sure to have a look at the optional dependencies which provide additional functionality.

Rubygems 1.2.0 has a bug that prevents the correct resolution of development dependencies. Therefore you should upgrade to at least 1.3.0 which fixes this bug. Otherwise you will have to use the following command to install webgen:

gem install --development webgen

Manual Installation

The latest version of webgen can always be downloaded from webgen’s files section on Rubyforge. After the download the package needs to be decompressed and then you can install webgen using the included setup.rb installation method:

$ ruby setup.rb config
$ ruby setup.rb setup
$ ruby setup.rb install

Make sure that you also install the mandatory and, if you need them, the optional dependencies.

Dependencies

• (mandatory) Ruby version 1.8.6 or 1.8.7. Since webgen is written in Ruby, you need the Ruby interpreter to run webgen.

• (mandatory) cmdparse version 2.0.0 or higher

• (mandatory) facets version 2.4.3 or higher

• (mandatory) maruku version 0.5.5 or higher

• (mandatory for webgui) ramaze version 2008.06

• (mandatory for webgui) launchy version 0.3.2 or higher

• (optional) RedCloth version 2.0.10 or higher for Textile support

• (optional) haml version 2.0.1 or higher for haml and sass support

• (optional) builder version 2.1.0 or higher for programmatic xml generation support

• (optional) rdoc version 2.0.0 for RDoc markup support

• (optional) coderay version 0.7.4.214 or higher for syntax highlighting

• (optional) feedtools version 0.2.29 for built-in feed generation support

• (optional) erubis version 2.6.2 for Erubis (enhanced ERB) support

• (optional) rdiscount version 1.2.9 for fast Markdown support

All these libraries can be installed via Rubygems (which I recommend). If you want to install all optional dependencies when installing webgen via Rubygems, install webgen using the --development option.

Author

• Thomas Leitner
• e-Mail: t_leitner@gmx.at
• GPG Key-Id: 0xB2D0A854