Exporting to an SSG

An export engine takes the AST and data produced by StaticShape’s diffing phase and renders it into the files needed for a specific static site generator. Each engine translates the same intermediate representation into a different templating language and folder structure.

#What an engine produces

Every export engine generates four categories of output:

#Static files

All non-HTML files from the source site (images, CSS, fonts, etc.) are copied into the engine’s static assets directory. The directory name varies by SSG — for example, Hugo uses static/.

#Layout templates

Each collection gets a layout file containing the shared HTML structure with SSG-specific templating syntax. The AST nodes are rendered into the target language:

Variable nodes become template variable tags
Loop nodes become iteration blocks
Conditional nodes become conditional blocks
Markdown variables are piped through a markdown filter
Content nodes become the SSG’s content insertion tag

#Content files

Each page in a collection produces a content file with:

Front matter (YAML) containing all extracted data for that page
Rendered content from the page’s content section, if one was configured

#Config files

The engine generates an SSG configuration file (e.g. hugo.yaml) and a CloudCannon configuration file for CMS integration.

#Engine interface

Each export engine implements five methods:

Method	Purpose
`staticDirectory()`	Returns the path where static assets should be placed
`engineConfig()`	Generates the SSG config file
`cloudCannonConfig()`	Generates the CloudCannon config file
`exportLayout()`	Renders a collection’s AST layout into a template file
`exportCollectionItem()`	Renders a page’s data and content into a content file

#Supported engines

SSG	Status
Hugo	Implemented
11ty	Planned
Astro	Planned
Jekyll	Planned