nyum

A simple Pandoc-powered static site generator for your recipe collection.

This tool takes a collection of Markdown-formatted recipes and turns it into a lightweight, responsive, searchable website for your personal use as a reference while cooking, or for sharing with family and friends. It's not intended as a cooking blog framework – there's no RSS feed, no social sharing buttons, and absolutely zero SEO.

📓 Think of it as a cookbook for nerds.

Below the screenshots, you'll find some notes on setting this tool up, running it, formatting your recipes, and deploying the generated site.

Screenshots

If you prefer a live website over the following screenshots, feel free to check out the demo on GitHub Pages!

On an old-fashioned computer, a recipe might look more or less like this – notice the little star indicating that this is a favorite!

Below, on the right, is the same page shown at tablet scale. More interestingly, the index page is shown on the left (with an active search) – note that you can, of course, customize the title and description.

Finally, more of the same on three phone-sized screens. The three-column layout doesn't fit here, so instructions are shown below ingredients. And of course the light's turned off if you've enabled dark mode on your device.

Usage

Setup

First off, either git clone this repository or download it as a ZIP. (You can clear out the _recipes/ and _site/ directories to get rid of the demo data.)

I don't like complicated dependency trees and poorly-documented build processes, so here's an exhaustive list of the dependencies you're not overwhelmingly likely to already have:

Pandoc – version 2.8 (released in November 2019) or later (earlier versions don't support partials/subtemplates).

On macOS, assuming you're using Homebrew, brew install pandoc will do the trick. On Linux, your package manager almost certainly has it (although the version it provides might be outdated – recent binaries are available here).

That's it, only one dependency! Hooray!

(Since build.sh relies on some Bash-specific bits and bobs and ubiquitous POSIX utilities like awk and tee, you'll also need those – but since Bash the default shell on most non-Windows systems, you're likely running it already. If you're a Windows user, don't despair: Through the magic of WSL and possibly some Git or text editor reconfiguration to deal with line endings, it's definitely possible to run this tool. If you run into trouble, feel free to file an issue, but know that I might be unable to offer much well-founded advice.)

Configuration

Open config.yaml in whichever text editor you heart is drawn to in the moment and follow the instructions in the comments. There's not actually very much to configure.

You can, for example, change the language of your site. There's also a setting show_images_on_index (whose name obviates any need for further explanation).

Building

Run bash build.sh.

(It accepts a few optional flags, notably --help which tells you about the rest of them.)

Formatting

TL;DR: See the example recipes in _recipes/.

Each recipe begins with YAML front matter specifying its title, how many servings it produces, whether it's spicy or vegan or a favorite, the category, an image (which must also be located in the _recipes/ directory), and other information. Scroll down a bit for a list of possible entries – most of these are optional!

The body of a recipe consists of horizontal-rule-separated steps, each listing ingredients relevant in that step along with the associated instruction. Ingredients are specified as an unordered list, with ingredient amounts enclosed in backticks (this enables the columns on the resulting website – if you don't care about that, omit the backticks). The instructions must be preceded with a >. Note that a step can also solely consist of an instruction.

You've got the full power of Markdown at your disposal – douse your recipes in formatting, include a picture for each step, and use the garlic emoji as liberally as you should be using garlic in your cooking!

_{(Before building this tool, I had been using a custom LaTeX template built on top of the cuisine package, which enforces a three-column, relevant-ingredients-next-to-instructions structure. [In the process of graduating from university, I found myself contemporaneously graduating from wanting to use LaTeX for everything, which was part of the impetus for building this tool.] I've found this structure to be more useful than the more commonly found all-ingredients-first-then-a-block-of-instructions approach.)}

Example

---
title: Cheese Buldak
original_title: 치즈불닭
category: Korean Food
description: Super-spicy chicken tempered with loads of cheese and fresh spring onions. Serve with rice and a light salad – or, better yet, an assortment of side dishes.
image: cheesebuldak.jpg
size: 2-3 servings
time: 1 hour
author: Maangchi
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9uI1-6Ac6A
spicy: ✓
favorite: ✓
---

* `2 tbsp` chili flakes (gochugaru)
* `1 tbsp` gochujang
* `½-⅔ tbsp` soy sauce
* `1 tbsp` cooking oil
* `¼ tsp` pepper
* `2-3 tbsp` rice or corn syrup
* `2 tbsp` water

> Mix in an oven-proof saucepan or cast-iron skillet – you should end up with a thick marinade.

---

* `3-4 cloves` garlic
* `2 tsp` ginger

> Peel, squish with the side of your knife, then finely mince and add to the marinade.

---

> ⋯ (omitted for brevity)

---

> Garnish with the spring onion slices and serve.

YAML front matter

You must specify a non-empty value for the title entry. Everything else is optional:

original_title: Name of the recipe in, say, its country of origin.
category: Self-explanatory. Recipes belonging to the same category will be grouped on the index page. Don't name a category such that the generated category page will have the same URL as a recipe.
description A short description of the dish, it will be shown on the index page as well.
nutrition: Allows you to note down some nutrition facts for a recipe. Must take the form of a list, for example:
```
nutrition:
  - 300 calories
  - 60 g sugar
  - 0.8 g fat
  - 3.8 g protein
```
image: Filename of a photo of the prepared dish, e.g., strawberrysmoothie.jpg. The image must be located alongside the Markdown document – not in a subdirectory, for instance.
image_attribution and image_source: If you haven't created the recipe photo yourself, you might be required to attribute its author or link back to its source (which should be an URL). The attribution, if set, will be shown semi-transparently in the bottom right corner of the image. If the source is non-empty, a click on the image will take you there.
size: How many servings does the recipe produce, or how many cupcakes does it yield, or does it fit into a small or large springform?
time: Time it takes from getting started to serving.
author: Your grandma, for example.
source: Paste the source URL here if the recipe is from the internet. If set, this will turn the author label into a link. If no author is set, a link labelled "Source" will be shown.
favorite: If set to a non-empty value (e.g., "✓"), a little star will be shown next to the recipe's name. It'll also receive a slight boost in search results.
veggie and vegan: Similar and self-explanatory. If neither of these is set to a non-empty value, a "Meat" label will be shown.
spicy, sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami: Similar – if set to a non-empty value, a colorful icon will be shown.

Deployment

After running build.sh, just chuck the contents of _site/ onto a server of your choice.

Rsyncing to a server

For my own convenience, I've written deploy.sh, which reads a remote target of the form USER@SERVER:PATH from config.yaml and then uses rsync to push _site/ cloudwards – you're welcome to use it, too. If you do:

Note that rsync's --delete flag is set, so make sure the target path is correct before deploying for the first time. If you don't, stuff that shouldn't be deleted or overwritten might indeed be deleted or overwritten!
You'll need to manually create the target path on the remote before the first deployment.
You can run bash deploy.sh --dry-run to sanity-check yourself.
Run bash deploy.sh --help to learn about another very exciting flag!

Automated deployment to GitHub Pages

Because not everone's into antiquated rsync-powered deployment methods, @jlnrrg and @quentin-dev have constructed a GitHub action (see .github/workflows/build-ci.yml) that will spin up a Ubuntu system, install a recent version of Pandoc, build the site, and deploy it to the gh-pages branch of the repository.

I've disabled it for this repsitory since I prefer the _site/ to be part of the main branch for demo purposes, but I believe it should activate automatically if you fork this repository. You might also need to explicitly enable GitHub Pages for your fork.

(Coupled with the "Edit" link shown at the bottom of each recipe if you've specified a link to your repository in config.yaml, continuous integration effectively turns your site into a wiki!)

Updating

As bugs are fixed and features added (not that I expect much of either), you might wish to update your instance. Instead of adherence to versioning best-practices or even a semblance of an update scheme, here's instructions on how to perform a manual update:

Replace _assets/, _templates/, build.sh, and deploy.sh of your instance with what's currently available in this repository.
Check if any new knobs and toggles have been added to config.yaml and adapt them into your config.yaml.

That should do it! (Perhaps build your site and inspect it to verify that nothing has broken – feel free to file an issue if something has.)

FAQ

(As in "𝓕ound, by me, to be likely-to-be-𝓐sked 𝓠uestions, the reason being that I asked these questions to myself during construction of this thing".)

Why not just use Jekyll or one of the other 314 fully-featured static site generators out there?

Because I thought writing a Bash script where I construct a JSON value based on other JSON values using a single-purpose reimplementation of SQL's GROUP BY clause reliant on the built-in string manipulation functionality would be simpler/faster/better, i.e., because I'm a dummy.

(But, newly, a dummy armed with a custom dodgy-yet-working static site generator, so you better not cross me!)

How/why does that huge mess in `build.sh` work?

Apart from the translation of Markdown into HTML, which is a fairly self-explanatory pandoc call, and the config.yaml shenanigans, which are merely a medium-sized mess: I wanted to build an index page listing all recipes, but ordered by category and with cute spicy/vegan/etc. icons along with category pages linked from the index pages and recipe pages.

Each recipe has a set of metadata (specified using YAML, but that's not relevant here), including its category. When outputting HTML, Pandoc provides the $meta-json$ template variable which resolves to a JSON value containing this metadata. Crucially, it understands the same format during input – when invoking pandoc with the --metadata-file PATH flag, the metadata from that file is merged into the input's metadata before further processing. The challenge, then, was transforming the JSON-shaped metadata of all recipes into a single JSON value grouping them by category, along with one separately stored JSON value for each category (which was essentially free, in terms of complexity, given the code generating the grouped JSON value).

This led me down the path of...

Writing the metadata of each recipe to a JSON file in _temp/ by feeding them into Pandoc and using a template solely consisting of $meta-json$ .
Writing the paths of each metadata file, along with the associated category, to a separate file in temp/ using a similar minimal template.
Employing a cut-sort-uniq pipeline to distill a list of unique categories.
Using a good ol' bespoke nested-loops join for grouping, i.e., iterating through the list of categories and for each category, writing its name to the output JSON file before iterating though the list of paths-and-categories from step 2 to figure-out-the-path-of-and-collect the recipe metadata belonging to the current category.

The final implementation is a bit more complicated than this pseudocode – largely because of string munging overhead.

Building the search "index" works similarly, but without the need for any grouping shenanigans.

Since this static site generator is based around a Bash script and Bash is a terrible language as far as robust string manipulation is concerned, are there any pitfalls with regard to filenames and such?

Why, there are indeed! I'm 100% sure these could be remedied quite easily, but they don't interfere with my use case, so I didn't bother. If you run into any problems because of this, please file an issue or cancel me on Twitter.

No spaces in filenames. Your computer might explode.
You can't have a recipe with filename index.md – it'll be overwritten by the generated index page.
Things will probably break if _recipes/ is empty (but then, there's not much to be done in that case, anyway).
The value of uncategorized_label in config.yaml may not contain an odd number of double quotation marks ".
Almost certainly more!

What if I want to print one of the recipes with black water on dead wood?

While this isn't a use case I'm particularly interested in, I've added a few CSS rules that should help with it.

How's browser support looking?

The CSS I've written to render Pandoc's output in three columns is a bit fragile, but I've successfully coaxed it into yielding near-identical results in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome and Safari. If you run into any problems, please file an issue.

Any plans for future development?

Eh, not really. Some proposed enhancements that I may or may not implement are tracked in an issue. And content, but that won't be publicly available.

Is there a C-based tool that's much better but not yours, so your not-invented-here syndrome didn't permit you to use it?

I think you might be alluding to Hundred Rabbits' Grimgrains. Big fan.

The sans-serif typeface Barlow is licensed under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1, see _assets/fonts/barlow/OFL.txt.
Lora, the serif typeface used in places where Barlow isn't, is also licensed under the SIL Open Font License Version 1.1, see _assets/fonts/lora/OFL.txt.
The icons (despite having been modified slightly) are part of Tabler Icons, they're licensed under the MIT License, see _assets/tabler-icons/LICENSE.txt. The placeholder image shown on the index page for recipes that don't have their own image if the show_images_on_index option is enabled also makes use of these icons.

Finally, some shoutouts that aren't really licensing-related, but fit better here than anywhere else in this document:

The device mockups used to spice up the screenshots in this document are from Facebook Design.
Because you're dying to know this, let me tell you that the screenshots' background image is based on a Google Maps screenshot of a lithium mining operation in China.
I've designed the logo using a previous project of mine, the Markdeep Diagram Drafting Board.

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