Where should templates live?

[ncphillips]

The site templates for Jekyll and Hugo are being deployed to nominate and downloaded into the users NPM modules. They should definitely be moved out of static-scripts, but they might continue live in this repository. I think it would be preferable git urls could be passed in as a template, and the template only be fetched on Init. This would allow for third party templates to be easily createable

[ncphillips]

Our current thought is that different templates will be created as separate static-scripts.

There are currently 3 scripts in mind:

1. static-scripts
2. static-scripts-hugo
3. static-scripts-jekyll

[chrisdmacrae]

Goals

I think the goal of this project should be:

• To provide a single best-practice zero-configuration build for static sites, supporting any generator.
• To allow developers to fork and create their preferred best-practise zero-configuration build
• To make it relatively easy for developers to add support for any static site generator they'd like

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Overview

In CRA, the packages are all interdependent, not standalone versions. To create your own version of CRA (i.e, change the template or build scripts) you need to fork the monorepo and pass a flag when using CRA.

I feel like this repository should work like that. All of the packages are related to core functionality of our best-practices, and templates are provided either:

• within the core script (static-scripts)
  • in this scenario, developers add first-party support for SSGs and submit them via PR
• outside of C-S-S altogether -- C-S-S provides the ability to provide an external template (see below)

C-S-S Variants

If developers want to define a completely different zero-config build pipeline, they fork the project, make changes, and then publish as a new NPM package/Git repo.

This can then be used in C-S-S via --scripts-version THIRD_PARTY_SCRIPT_NAME

• For NPM packages, THIRD_PARTY_SCRIPT_NAME is NPM package name.
• For GitHub repos, THIRD_PARTY_SCRIPT_NAME can be formatted as user/repo#feature\/branch. See https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#github-urls
• For other Git repos, THIRD_PARTY_SCRIPT_NAME can be formatted as <protocol>://[<user>[:<password>]@]<hostname>[:<port>][:][/]<path>[#<commit-ish> | #semver:<semver>]. See Git URLs as Dependencies

Templates

Core templates

Core templates are stored in aliases to valid http endpoints. (See [external templates)[#external-templates])

If third-party developers want to create new templates they can:

• create a template, fork the project, add an alias to that template, and submit a PR
• create a template, use it, call it a day

External templates

• fetch from a publically accessible URL of an archive containing the template
• add the external template as an NPM dependency w/ a specific file structure, and copy the contents from the locally installed package?
• OR fetch from a public or private Git repository URL, clone to a tmp dir, and then copy everything except for the .git/ folder to the CWD, and then delete the tmp dir.

[chrisdmacrae]

Another thought -- should we rename templates to generators?

For all intents and purposes, all templates should be a "generator". Even if it's a project using react, react-router and renderToString() to generate the HTML, or just mustache templates, that's an SSG.