Canary

Markdown In -> Website Out. A web framework for those with enough web development skills to want to avoid it. Canary is a framework for making websites out of a directory of markdown documents. It consists of a typescript client router, paired with a C# build and deploy tool for rendering your pages in HTML at build time. This makes a site with smooth SPA like page navigation while still playing nice with web crawlers, direct links, and preview scrapers.

Why it exists

Canary comes out of Consoland development. There was always a plan of at least publishing a collection of tools. When it became clear that SEO wasn't going to be possible with the # navigation of the original site, I decided to start that process earlier than originally planned.

v0.2.0

• canary build --clean, plus a root-copy/ folder so a clean rebuild doesn't wipe extra files you keep in the output dir.
• Toolchain C# tools can be Native AOT-precompiled (canary tools build). canary tools validate catches UTF-8 mangling before it hits a page.
• canary explore nav and canary explore toolchain for looking at a site without grepping JSON.

What's under the hood

• Markdown -> HTML renderer.
• Widgets -> made using JavaScript and templated HTML (mustache) Downloads and Slideshow are examples on this site.
• Toolchain -> optionally transform your markdown files before render to keep the source markdown documents cleaner.
• Client Router -> Rebuilds using history API to give you a live editing experience.
• Command Line Interface

canary build | canary serve | canary publish | [and more]

Status

Alpha release is out and functional (if this site is working at least). Source is on GitHub and open under the MIT License. Would be happy to receive any suggestions or contributions there.

Downloads

Try Canary out for yourself! Every published release is on the Canary Archive.