Sculpin Review

Sun, Oct 18, 2020

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Sculpin is a Static site generator written in PHP with a dependency on yarn.

Getting started

• Install composer

sudo apt-get install composer php-xml

• Create a site

composer create-project sculpin/blog-skeleton test-sculpin
cd test-sculpin
yarn install

• Start the local server in two separate terminals

composer yarn-watch

composer sculpin-watch

• Create a post

touch source/_posts/2020-10-01-my-first-post.md

• Add some content.

---
title: Time travel
tags:
    - firstpost
    - testing
categories:
    - testing
---

# Hello world.

Normal text.

*Markdown is cool.*

**So is twig, because it knows this page's name is: {{ page.title }}**

At this point I have content displaying. If you had trouble getting that working, check the troubleshooting section

Folder layout

• app - Sculpin config files
• node_modules - yarn downloads packages here that get used for webpack and sass.
• output_dev - Output files used during live server.
• source - This is where your content goes.
  • assets - images, CSS, javascript
  • build - output from yarn
• vendor

Creating content

• Top level Pages go in the content folder.
• Posts go in the content/<type>/ folder (I chose posts).

I organize my content by category. Each category is a folder, with the posts under the category. This allows you to have landing pages for each category called _index.md.

The content files are all split into 2 parts, the front matter and the content. The front matter is where Hugo gets parameter values to fill in the templates.

The front matter should look something like this:

---
title: "Post Title"
date: 2020-10-04T17:46:45-06:00
image: "posts/blogging/hugo-logo.svg"
draft: false
---

Markdown Syntax

Supports the standard markdown syntax as well as TWIG macros.

Images and other Assets

• Images are stored under the source/assets folder
• Referencing images requires the full path, such as /assets/images/myImage.png, which would be under site_name/source/assets/images/myImage.png.

Content Templates (Archetypes)

Sculpin doesn’t have any default templates, so you’ll have to copy and paste your template from somewhere if you want to use one.

Customizing themes

I couldn’t find any premade themes that can be downloaded for Sculpin, so you’ll have to modify the one that it comes with.

The files you’ll look to customize will be here:

• source/assets/css/app.scss
• source/assets/js/app.js
• source/_layouts/default.html
• source/_views/post.html

Theme syntax

Sitemap

Sculpin generates the sitemap for you, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Speed

Troubleshooting

• Pages need to be prefixed with date in the format YYYY-MM-DD
• Titles in the front matter can’t have quotes
• Certain content inside the code sections can cause parse errors with TWIG, specifically the double curly brace.
• The process “./vendor/bin/sculpin generate –watch –server” exceeded the timeout of 300 seconds - I’ve noticed that the command line tends to crash, however the server is still running in the background, so you may get an error like:

In TcpServer.php line 164:
                                                                    
  Failed to listen on "tcp://0.0.0.0:8000": Address already in use  

In which case you need to kill the server that’s running in the background.

ps -ef | grep php
kill <pid from previous command>

Or if you want a one liner…

kill `ps -C php -o pid=`