Introduction

Preacher is a personal static website generator, which allows you to setup and maintain a personal website with zero configuration.

Fresh installation

To create a fresh website using Preacher, one can install it as follows:

composer create-project zero-config/static-website

When asked to remove the existing VCS, answer Y.

Installation on top of existing website

composer require --dev zero-config/preacher

This installs the necessary files and packages. The next step is initiating a git repository, so Preacher can keep track of what needs to be published:

git init

Now all we need to do, is commit our first page and template:

git add index.md default.html.twig && git commit -m "My first Preacher page!"

To see what a basic .md page file and template can contain, have a look at Preacher's own index.md page and default.html.twig template.

By default, Preacher will look for the Twig template called default.html.twig. However, if a custom template is required, simply give it the same name as the source file.

E.g.: articles/something-fancy.md => articles/something-fancy.html.twig.

Generating pages

Preacher creates pages from the committed .md page files and .twig templates. It uses a single command to either generate the current directory and all its children, or one can (re)generate a single source file.

vendor/bin/preach [<source>]...

Optionally, if one wants to always generate output when a file is committed, try the following:

ln -s ../../vendor/bin/preach .git/hooks/post-commit

This will install Preacher as a post-commit hook and makes it run each time you commit one of your files.

The contents of vendor directories are skipped by interpreting the vendor-dir composer config.

If one wants to force the generation of files, add the --force flag.

Standards

Preacher uses existing software with well-defined standards to create the most stable and user friendly experience at the same time.

Preacher is built with programmers in mind.

Documentation

For full documentation and a cookbook for Preacher, go to the Preacher homepage.