Update 2014: I do not use hsenv any more; instead, I use cabal sandboxes — and so should you!
I decided to ditch wordpress.com, because:
- I cringe every time I have to use their web GUI for adding new posts.
- I don’t really need to use all of the features that come with a free wordpress blog.
- Wordpress automatically puts in hard line breaks… this is so annoying. For one thing, I like to type one sentence per line in plain text, because then if I do a revision, the (git) diff looks very, very clear and sexy. In fact, this is how I write all of my LaTeX files. But with Wordpress’s forced line breaks, I have to manually join all the lines before submitting it into the New Post text dialog box. Annoying.
- I want to use git to track my blog posts because they are quite valuable to me and a lot of other people.
Now, why choose Hakyll? I chose it because it’s the only Haskell static site generator out there with real users and active development. Granted, the road to using Hakyll was very difficult, because right now actually it is in a transition stage to the new Hakyll version 4. However, the hurdles were well worth it.
My system is Arch Linux.
Install cabal
First, we need to install the cabal-install package from the [extra]
repo.
sudo pacman -S cabal-install
Install hsenv with cabal
Now we need to install hsenv. hsenv is neat because it allows you to
have a sandboxed cabal/haskell/ghc environment on a per-shell-session
basis. The biggest dependency is pandoc, which actually fails to
install using plain cabal; not to worry, because [extra] already has
the haskell-pandoc package.
sudo pacman -S haskell-pandoc
Now we install hsenv. We use the forked version from
tmhedberg’s repo because the
original maintainer’s repo has
been suffering from bitrot for a few months now (the original maintainer
has disappeared).
git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/tmhedberg/hsenv.git
cd hsenv
cabal install
Download hakyll and install it with hsenv for your new blog
Now we need to get the latest hakyll. I decided to check out the
hakyll4 branch because from what I can tell this version allows you to
do painless syntax highlighting with pandoc. You could just use the
regular master branch (hakyll 3.x) but syntax highlighting support on
code blocks is a pain; plus, you’re going to have to migrate to hakyll 4
later anyway, so just use hakyll4.
git clone --depth 1 -b hakyll4 http://github.com/jaspervdj/hakyll.git
The hakyll4 repo has several working sample blog sites. Now go into the
just-cloned hakyll repo, and copy the contents of the data/example
folder to your new blog’s directory.
cp ~/hakyll/data/example ~/myblog
Now go to your myblog folder and instantiate a hsenv sandbox, and
then install hakyll into this sandbox.
cd ~/myblog
~/.cabal/bin/hsenv
source .hsenv_myblog/bin/activate
cd ~/hakyll
cabal install
cd ~/myblog
The hsenv basically changes your shell’s path parameters and also
installs everything into the .hsenv_myblog folder, thus giving your
shell a different “vision”, so to speak, of what packages are installed.
We use the sandbox environment inside hsenv whenever we want to
generate our blog’s static generator binary (remember, hakyll is just
a library; we need to write a static site generator program that makes
use of it to generate the static html/css).
To deactivate the sandbox, invoke deactivate_hsenv or just close your
shell. Just remember to call source .hsenv_myblog/bin/activate when
you want to make changes to your blog or edit your blog’s binary. A
sample creating/edition session would look something like this:
cd ~/myblog
source .hsenv_myblog/bin/activate
# edit some files, including site.hs, the static generator binary
# compile site.hs
./site rebuild
./site preview
...
deactivate_hsenv
Your static site will be available at ~/myblog/_site.
Create and upload your site to GitHub
At your GitHub site/account, create a repo named username.github.io.
Now link it up with your static site:
cd ~/myblog/_site
git init
git add *.html # add css, etc.
git commit -m "initial import"
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/username.github.io.git
git push -u origin master
Source
This site’s source code is available here. This site’s static code is available here.
