Wintersmith is an open source flexible static website generator written in Node.js that uses Jade for templating and Marked.

Jade is a simple and easy to use templating engine that supports complete HTML markup and uses indent to nest a specific tag in or out of another tag. Marked is a Markdown parser that supports GitHub Flavored Markdown. Wintersmith stores its preferences and settings in a config.json file. Wintersmith is faster than most of the popular static website generator, Wintersmith can gain more functionality when plugins are added by default, Wintersmith ships with paginator.coffee plugin that lets you paginate your posts. Wintersmith is also very lightweight which makes it a winner for the Raspberry Pi in the static website world.

We can begin by installing Wintersmith by following a few simple steps.

Installing Node.js on Debian based Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi (Raspbian, PiBang).

Downloading

wget http://node-arm.herokuapp.com/node_latest_armhf.deb  
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Installing

sudo dpkg -i node_latest_armhf.deb  
Code language: CSS (css)

Installing Node.js on Arch Linux ARM for Raspberry Pi.

sudo pacman -Sy nodejs  

Installing on Fedora based Linux distribution for Raspberry Pi (Fedora ARM, Pidora).

sudo yum install node npm  

Once you are done installing Node.js on your Raspberry Pi, we can now go ahead and successfuly install Wintersmith.

sudo npm install -g wintersmith  

We now have Wintersmith installed on our Raspberry Pi.

You can now create you first Wintersmith based website.

wintersmith new Blog  
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Now you can enter the directory.

cd Blog/  

We can load the preview web server that comes built-in in Wintersmith.

wintersmith preview  

We can also build the output files.

wintersmith build  

To customize your website edit config.json.

I compiled a list of software and services that I use to improve my workflow, here is the link to the list.

Darryl Dias

I’m Darryl. I’m a 3D Artist, Programmer and Linux enthusiast. On this site I share my insights, tips and tricks, tutorials, methods and best practices.