So Long Jekyll, Hello Nextein!

Over the last couple weeks I have been working on nextein. It is a blog / static site generator based on the great work of Next.js. I decided then to migrate my own blog. I'm a Javascript developer. Writting a blog in Markdown is super simple. Having to deal with ruby & liquid was an experience I didn't like much. Don't get me wrong. Jekyll is awesome and very versatile. But it is ruby. And liquid. And I'm not a ruby developer.

So here I am. I'm gonna try to give you a hint of what I did for getting this blog running with nextein.

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Jekyll

Jekyll is the defacto for Github Pages. There are some concepts in jekyll (such as Layouts & Includes) that can be easily mapped to React components and other abstractions.

Nextein

As I mentioned, nextein is based on next.js. next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications. In version 3 they added the feature to export static html. That is exactly what I wanted for a blog engine: React server-rendering and generated static html. nextein is an addition on top of next.js to simplify using Markdown to generate posts / pages.

Migrating to Nextein

First of all, we need node.js and npm. To get started we will need to create our npm project and install all dependencies:

npm init -y

This will generate a package.json and we can tweak there the project name, description, author information, etc. This is not going to be published as a package. But it's nice to keep things clean.

npm i next react react-dom nextein@beta

We are almost ready to start. nextein requires to define a next.config.js file and define next.js configuration with nextein wrapper. Create a next.config.js file in your project root as follows:

next.config.js

const config = require('nextein/config').default;

module.exports = config({
    // put your next.js config here
});

We need to add the npm scripts for dev and export:

{
	"name": "my-awesome-blog",
	"description": "Yeah, Awesome",
	"scripts":{
		"dev": "nextein",
		"export": "nextein build && nextein export"
	},
}

Pages

The pages directory contains all next.js pages components. These means that if we want to have an index & about pages then we need to create index.js and about.js in here.

The index.js will be exported by default by nextein. To export about.js we need to add it to the exportPathMap configuration from next.js

Back to our next.config.js we will add:

const config = require('nextein/config').default;

module.exports = config({
	exportPathMap: function() {
		return {
			'/about': { page: '/about' }
		};
	}
});

Includes & Layouts

In jekyll each post or page has a layout. You can also refactor common pieces and use includes to reuse them across different layouts.

With nextein the simple way to reason about this is to think of /pages as layouts and react components to replace your includes (you can place them whenever you like, I usually use /components)

Posts

Posts follows pretty much the same logic as in jekyll except dates in post name are not required. The layout becomes the page in the post frontmatter.

post-name.md

---
page: post
title: Awesome Post
date: 2017-08-21
---

Here goes the content of your post.

This by default will generate an exported url as

/post-name

if you add a category in the post frontmatter

---
page: post
title: Awesome Post
date: 2017-08-21
category: blog
---

this becomes available as:

/blog/post-name

Displaying a List of Posts

To display a list of posts in our pages we will use some of the HOCs (withPosts, withPost) and the Content tag provided by nextein.

/pages/index.js

import React from 'react'
import withPosts from 'nextein/posts'
import { Content } from 'nextein/post' 

export default withPosts(({ posts }) => {
	
	return (
		<div>
			<header>
				<h1>Welcome to my Blog</h1>
			</header>
			<div>
			posts.map((post, idx) => {
				<article key="post-${idx}">
					<h1>
						<a href={post.data.url}>{post.data.title}</a>
					</h1>
					<Content {...post} excerpt />
				</article>
			})
			</div>
		</div>
	)
})

That's pretty much all we need for displaying a list of posts in the index file.

Rendering a Post

Now that we have the list of posts we will want to create the layout for our post. Remember the post front matter defined the page as page: post. This means we need to create a /pages/post.js to display the post content.

/pages/post.js

import React from 'react'
import withPost, { Content } from 'nextein/post'

export default withPost(({ post }) => {
	return (
		<div>
			<h1>{post.data.title}</h1>
			<Content {...post} />
		</div>
	)
})

We can now run our dev server with npm run dev or export the site as a static version with npm run export

Deploying with GitHub Pages

One thing we need to add to our generated directory is an empty file .nojekyll. This is necessary since GithubPages will ignore files and folder that starts with underscore. Such as the case of the _next folder.

cat #nojekyll > .nojekyll

We can add that file and copy it over the distribution directory (./out by default) using the npm scripts:

{
	"scripts": {
		"dev": "nextein",
		"export": "nextein build && nextein export",
		"copy-nojekyll": "cp .nojekyll out/"
	}

}

We are now ready to do the actual deploy to Github Pages. I have used gh-pages module to commit the generated code to the desired branch.

If we are using a normal repository, we can push to a gh-pages branch, or change the distribution folder to point to /docs. The former is simpler and we have a separated branch for the code and the site files.

In case we are using an organization or user repository (usually named in the form of <user|organization>.github.io) in this case the only branch that can be used is master.

To avoid issues with this, it is recommendable to branch your code and use gh-pages to deploy to master

Let's add the module and make the changes in the package.json scripts.

npm i gh-pages

	"scripts": {
		"dev": "nextein",
		"export": "nextein build && nextein export",
		"copy-nojekyll": "cp .nojekyll out/",
		"deploy": "npm run export && npm run copy-nojekyll && gh-pages -t -d out -b master "
	}

To summarize, the deploy script will run the export from nextein, copy the .nojekyll to the ./out and push that directory (-d out) into the master branch (-b master). The -t option is needed to push files starting with a dot (remember we have that .nojekyll file?)