clover sitegen framework

this repository contains clover's "sitegen" framework, which is a set of tools that assist building websites. these tools power https://paperclover.net.

• HTML "Server Side Rendering") engine written from scratch.
  • A more practical JSX runtime (class instead of className, etc).
  • Transparent integration with Marko to mix component types.
  • MDX support for text-heavy content pages.
• Incremental static site generator and build system
  • Build entire production site at start, incremental updates when pages change; Build system state survives coding sessions.
  • The only difference in development and production mode is hidden source-maps and stripped assertions and console.debug calls. The site you see locally is the site you see deployed.
• Tools for building complex, content heavy web sites.
  • Static asset serving with ETag and build-time compression.
  • Dynamic server side rendering from within backend code.
  • Databases with a typed SQLite wrapper.
• Built on the battle-tested Node.js runtime. Partial support for Deno and Bun.

Included is src, which contains paperclover.net. Website highlights:

• Question/Answer board, custom markdown parser and components.
• File viewer with prefetching + client-side navigation.
• Personal, friends-only blog with password protection.

Development

npm install

# production generation
node run generate

# live development environment
node repl

repl.js will open a read-eval-print-loop where plugin state is cached (on my 2014 dev laptop, startup time is 600-1000ms). every file in framework and src besides hot.ts can be edited and quickly re-run. for example, to run framework/generate.ts, you can type "generate" into the shell. since top-level await is not supported (plugins are built on require as Node has poor module support), CLIs can include a main function, which is executed when the REPL runs it.

TODO: in the future, the repl will have a "dev" command which will do the incremental site build + host, possibly immediatly on opening the repl.

Contributions

No contributions to src accepted, only framework.