blog-cli: A CLI for Blogging with Static Site Generators

My blog is built with Hugo. Every blog I ever had was built with a static site generator or a file based CMS. I love static site generators, they make content management simple, they are secure and it’s fun to build websites with them.

For me, they have one problem: creating a blog post is annoying. Typically the file for the post needs to have the date in it and the slug and then you need to put in the Front Matter for the post. It is all just very tedious and annoying.

That’s why I made blog-cli. It creates the Markdown file for me at the right location with the correct file name, inserts the basic Front Matter and opens the file in my favorite Markdown editor. This means I go from post idea to writing in 1 second.

This should work for most static site generators. At least for simple setups.

Here is how it works.

First you have to install blog-cli. You need Node.js and npm for that.

npm install --global @kahlil/blog-cli

Then you need to tell blog-cli where you want it to put your posts.

blog --path ~/my-blog/posts

Then you need to tell blog-cli about your favorite Markdown Editor.

blog --editor 'ia writer'

Now you are all set and you can create a new post and open it in your editor by simple specifying a slug.

blog my-new-cool-post

This will create a new file with the filename: 2019–01–17-my-new-cool-post.md in the directory you specified, ~/my-blog/posts in this case.

The Front Matter that is inserted looks something like this:

--- draft: true date: 2019-01-18T10:03:48.620Z title: "" ---

Now, if you are part of the cool kids club then you probably keep your files in a Git repository, commit new blog posts and push them to Github at which point it gets deployed to Netlify.

It turns out that blog-cli can help you with that as well!

blog --publish

Will automatically commit all changes with the message ‘new post’ and execute a git push.

Nifty, right?! If you are static-site-generator-blogging as well I hope blog-cli can help you.

If you have any ideas to improve it please send an issue or a PR on GitHub.

Originally published at www.kahlillechelt.com on January 18, 2019.