zola-bin

What is Zola ?

Zola is a static site generator (SSG), similar to Hugo, Pelican, and Jekyll. It is written in Rust and uses the Tera template engine, which is similar to Jinja2, Django templates, Liquid, and Twig. Content is written in CommonMark, a strongly defined, highly compatible specification of Markdown.

Official Links

• Website
• Documentation
• Forum
• Github Repo

This repository provides the zola binary wrapper and the create-zola-site script as NPM packages.

Why Zola as a NPM package ??

Zola provides pre-built binaries for MacOS, Linux and Windows on its GitHub release page.

This package can be used for calling the pre-built Zola binary through Node, making it a part of node's vast NPM ecosystem. This package is a cross-platform, easy to install and integrate with other NPM packages. Also, This package gets the binaries directly from Zola Releases Page.

Usage

Add it as a dependency into your project or a new one, using....

npm i zola-bin

or

npm i -g zola-bin

From CLI

Format: zola-bin [args]

args are same as official zola CLI. Additionally, In your project's package.json file, you call it inside a script after adding it as a devDependency.

"scripts": {
    "dev": "zola-bin serve --port 7000 --open",
    "build": "zola-bin build"
}

---

JavaScript API

Note: Only supports ESM

import zola, { execZola, getZolaPath } from "zola-bin";

execZola([....args]); // same as calling zola-bin [args] from command line

Following methods are just a wrapper around execZola.

Check out for usage - https://www.getzola.org/documentation/getting-started/cli-usage

interface buildOps {
	base_url?: string;
	output_dir?: string;
	config_file?: string;
}
interface serveOps extends buildOps {
	open?: boolean;
	port?: number;
	interface?: string;
}

declare const zola: {
	build(options?: buildOps): void;

	serve(options?: serveOps): void;

	check(): void;

	help(cmdHelp?: "build" | "serve" | "check" | "init"): void;

	init(name?: string): void;
};

export default zola;

getZolaPath(): string; // returns path to zola binary

---

Environment Variables

Supports adding a custom zola binary path. Create a .env file in your project root directory and add the following line:

ZOLA_BIN_PATH="./somePathToZolaFile"

or

ZOLA_BIN_PATH="./somePathToZolaFile" zola-bin [args]

Getting Started with Create Zola Site

With NPM installed, you can quickly setup a new Zola site with the following command:

npx create-zola-site -n {NAME}

This will create a new directory {NAME} and initializes the necessary files in it. Note that the site created using this process depends on Node.js, so you might see package.json and node_modules in the directory. This doesn't mean it any works different than actual template initialized by Zola. But This template will simplify the process of creating, building and deploying a new site.

if you already have a existing site, you can add the zola-bin NPM package to make it work same as the one created with create-zola-site.

npm init
npm i -D zola-bin

And then you can add the following script to your package.json file:

"scripts": {
    "dev": "zola-bin serve --open",
    "build": "zola-bin build",
}

FAQ

• What is the difference between Zola and create-zola-site template ?

  • Nothing, directory structure is pretty much the same and works the same.
  • create-zola-site template creates extra files - package.json and node_modules, with zola-bin npm package as a devDependency, which is wrapper around zola binaries taken from zola official github repo releases.

• Why would I use this instead of the official one ?

  • Because for few who are used to NPM, this package makes it feel more like its a part of NPM ecosystem.
  • Easyily deploy the sites since Node.js and NPM are accepted by most of the hosting services.
  • Simple installation and usage.

• Any limitations ?

  • Node.js overhead which might be add few seconds to the cold start when starting a dev server.