Write static pages

When you site is done, you can continue to serve it within your Flask app, or you can write static html pages ready to be published on the web.

Almoststatic has the method write_static which write static pages on the disk. It only write the pages in the location that you choose.

The is up to you to publish your pages where you need and also to copy your static contents.

The best way to write static site is to write a little script, the core of script should be:

import almoststatic

a = almoststatic.Almoststatic()
a.load_config()

STATIC_URL = '/'
MEDIA_PREFIX = 'media'
DESTINATION = '../_static_site'
OUT_PAGES = ['write_static', 'write_done']

a.write_static(destination=DESTINATION,
               media_prefix=MEDIA_PREFIX,
               static_url=STATIC_URL,
               out_pages=OUT_PAGES)
a.write_json_meta(destination=DESTINATION)

The destination parameter is the location where files will be written in your disk.

The static_url parameter lets you to set location of files starting from your url, i.e. if your site goes on https://mystatic.example.com/my_pages/ static_url will be /my_pages/. If your pages will be read from file system you should leave static_url as an empty string so urls are treated as relative. If files goes on root of your domain static_url should be / because this optimize the browser cache.

The media_prefix parameter let you to change the location of media files from ‘/content/media’ which is the default in the development environment to the location where they will be in static site.

Consider that the write_static when is working changes the global variable is_static from False to True, so if in development time you have some pages that you don’t like to have in the static site, you can exclude them inspecting the value of that variable.

By default, write_static writes all pages of site, but if you need, you can choose the pages to write setting the pages parameter or the out_pages parameter.

The write_json_meta method let you write on a json file, all metadata for pages. This can be used to write some JavaScript on client side to access to information about pages.

If you wish, you can add to your script all you need to automate the publishing of site, like client ftp commands or automatic copying of media files and so on, see flaskapp.py of the sample folder to see automatic ftp publishing in action.