Frog+

A script for use with Greg Hendershott's Frog that streamlines some common workflows for writing blog posts, building/previewing the associated website, and deploying it to a remote hosting server.

As do many quick-and-dirty workarounds, Frog+ started life as a 10-line shell script and quickly grew, so it may migrate to a more fully-featured language, i.e. Racket. It is likely that several of Frog+'s features show up in Frog itself eventually, at which point they will likely be deprecated in Frog+.

If you choose to use this script, please be careful. Little/no work has been done to guarantee compatibility with different (or even standard) Frog directory setups. I'm sharing it simply because I found it useful for my own needs, and thought others might too.

Written and tested on Mac OS X 10.9.1 (Mavericks). Linux compatibility planned, but not currently implemented

Installation

Simply put the frog-plus script into your path.

Assumes that Frog is already installed and configured (which itself requires Racket). Also uses the Z shell (zsh) and some utilities/options that may only work on Mac.

For best results, open frog-plus in your editor of choice and set the values for the following variables:

• host -- Host name of the web server to which you're deploying
• wesite_path -- Path on the host to which the website will be deployed
• blog_dir -- Output directory used by Frog. This should match the value of "output-directory" in your .frogrc

Documentation

Frog+ provides several subcommands, and can be invoked with one or more of them at once. When specifying multiple subcommands, each one is executed in the order specified. For example, frog-plus clean build first performs a Frog clean (raco frog --clean) and then a build (raco frog --build). The full list of subcommands (with explanations) is as follows:

• new "<post title>"

Creates a new post with the given title (via raco frog --new "<post title>") and opens the file in the editor given by the environment's EDITOR variable.

The new command also creates a symlink to the new post file (named .draft) in the directory where the command was invoked. See also resume and delete-draft.

• build

Builds the website. This is equivalent to raco frog -b.

• preview

Preview the website. This is equivalent to raco frog -p.

Note that if the fixup subcommand has been used before preview, the preview will likely not represent what the deployed website will look like.

• fixup

Fixes up references to css and js files, as well as to contents of the generated "feeds" and "tags" directories when using an output directory other than ".". It also copies the "css," "img," and "js" directories from top-level into the output directory so that the directory may be used as a self-contained section of a website.

An example of the intended use case for fixup would be if you have an existing website, www.example.com, and you want to use Frog only for the blog portion, www.example.com/blog. To do so, you would set "output-directory" in your .frogrc and the blog_dir variable in frog-plus to "blog," run build and fixup, then copy the output "blog" directory to the host server (i.e. use the deploy subcommand).

• deploy

Uses the rsync command to copy the output directory (set in .frogrc) to the website host. Requires setting the host and website_path variables at the top of the frog-plus script file.

• clean

Removes all generated files. If using "." for the output directory, this executes raco frog -c and removes any non-front-page index.html files (i.e. index-[0-9]+.html) as well as the sitemap.txt file.

If using an output directory other than than ".", that directory is simply deleted.

• resume

Opens the .md file for the most recently created page using the editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable.

• delete-draft

Deletes the .md file for the most recently created page and the .draft symlink.

• init

Initializes the current directory as a Frog project. Equivalent to raco frog --init.

• all

Shorthand for frog-plus build fixup.

• all-deploy

Shorthand for frog-plus build fixup deploy.

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All other inputs are passed to frog unmodified.

Pull requests

Pull requests are welcome, though your time may be better spent (as might mine) by working on Frog itself.

License

Copyright © 2013 Chris Frisz (see included LICENSE file).