Hakyll, a static site generator in Haskell

Hakyll is a Haskell tool for generating static sites, mostly aimed at small-to-medium sites and personal blogs. It is highly configurable, with its own Domain Specific Language. If you need something more than Markdown support, say, TeX, or need to write your own compilation rules, it’s a powerful tool.

Installation

Assuming you have Haskell already installed, you can type:

cabal update
cabal install -j hakyll

Starting a new blog

Navigate to the directory above where you’d like to create your blog and type:

hakyll-init blog

You can replace blog with whatever you like.

If you run into errors, see this more detailed post on installing Hakyll

Generating the site

The file site.hs holds the configuration of your site, as an executable Haskell program. We can compile and run it like this:

$ cd blog
$ ghc --make -threaded site.hs

You’ve now made an executable called ‘site’ in your current directory. You can now use the build and watch commands for that executable.

$ ./site build

The command above made a directory called _site that holds the HTML, CSS, and other site files you can publish.

And to see your site, now you can:

$ ./site watch

which will start a server. Have a look at your site at http://127.0.0.1:8000/.

When you’ve launched your browser you should see something like this:

Check it all in to git

First, add a few things to a new .gitignore file:

 _cache
 site
 site.hi
 site.o

Then, you can check in your code and commit it:

git init
git add .
git commit -m 'initial commit of blog'

Add Bitbucket as a remote

Click on Create New Repository and create a new repo on bitbucket.

Click on Command line and follow the the instructions for “I have an existing project” Basically you are doing:

git remote add origin git@bitbucket.org:BITBUCKET-USERNAME/REPONAME.git

You need to replace BITBUCKET-USERNAME with your bitbucket username and REPONAME with the name of your repo that you created.

If you don’t have the Aerobatic plug-in installed yet, go to the Add-on Directory and install Aerobatic.

Deploy your site via Aerobatic

Deploying your site via Aerobatic as is a simple as setting up the plugin to point to the _site directory.

Hooray for Haskell! Your site is hosted!

Click on “Launch Website” to view your site. Our example code is hosted on Bitbucket here.