Static Website with Pandoc

I needed to pull off a quick website that would have various mathematics questions, and thought to try and use pandoc. Here are my learnings:

I first installed pandoc-bin because I didn't to deal with a lot of haskell dependencies.

yay -S pandoc-bin

The first iteration I made generated an index.html file with all the contents and a table of contents. The following bashscript shows this:

mkdir -p output
pandoc --toc -f markdown -t html --mathjax -s -o ./output/index.html *.md
rsync -rav -e "ssh -p PORT" output/ username@domain:/destination_folder

A sample file would look like this:

# Title that will be in table of contents

Content body

The order in the table of contents is on the alphabetical ordering of the files. In my case, the date prefixed all files, so they ended up in the order I wanted them to.

The file however became too large after some time. I didn't want to get a static site manager for this, so I tweaked the bashscript.

I can compile each file to a separate html file with pandoc, but I first need to get a list of all files I want.

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.md" -printf "%f\n" | sort | xargs -I % pandoc -f markdown -t html --mathjax --metadata title="questions" -o %.html  %

I need to ensure compile the files to a common directory so that its easy to sync with my server. An index file that links up to all the children files should also be generated dynamically, so that I can easily find the links. I created a custom function gen_html that does this:

gen_html () {
    mkdir -p test_compile
    file_name=$1
    name="${1%.*}"
    echo "[${name}](./${name}.html)" >> index.md
    echo "" >> index.md
    pandoc -f markdown -t html --mathjax --metadata title="questions" -s -o ./test_compile/${name}.html $file_name
}

xargs runs in a different process, so the function gen_html will not be available for that. To fix this, we first export it and then call it with the xargs context. The _ is a place holder for argv[0] and % is the parameter defined by -I. See this link for more information.

export -f gen_html
find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -name "*.md" -printf "%f\n" | sort | xargs -I % bash -c 'gen_html "$@"' _ %

After which I generate the index with:

pandoc -f markdown -t html --mathjax -s -o ./test_compile/index.html index.md

You can find the full code in this gihub gist.