Zim

Zim as a native SSG on GitLab Pages

Asked by David on 2016-07-05

Static site generators [1] allow you to store plaintext markup under version control, render the markup to HTML on a server, and present the HTML files to the reader. Obviously Zim is capable of this.

The benefit of native support on GitLab Pages (or GitHub, etc) is that instead of storing your Zim notebook in version control, manually rendering to HTML, and storing the HTML in *another* version control repo, you would have to manage only one repo, and rendering would happen every time you pushed to upstream.

How feasible would it be for a third-party to support Zim as a server-side SSG engine? Any obvious gotchas?

[1] https://www.staticgen.com

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Solved

For:: Zim Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Solved by:: Jaap Karssenberg

Solved:: 2016-07-08

Last query:: 2016-07-08

Last reply:: 2016-07-06

Link existing bug

Revision history for this message

David (lofidevops) said on 2016-07-05:

Requested support at GitLab: https://gitlab.com/pages/pages.gitlab.io/issues/22

Revision history for this message

Jaap Karssenberg (jaap.karssenberg) said on 2016-07-06:

I think the main gotcha is that zim is written in python. I do not know what technology these generators you mention use, but if it is a different programming language, you are looking at re-implementing the interesting bits.

Second gotcha is that zim presents a notebook that consists of many pages. It uses an index to back that up. Rendering pages one-by-one will look kind of OK, but some features will not work without info from other pages.

Revision history for this message

David (lofidevops) said on 2016-07-08:

It looks like they use their continuous integration infrastructure, which accounts for Python and other dependencies. In this case, they used the version of Zim included on Debian Jessie:

https://gitlab.com/pages/zim/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml

https://gitlab.com/pages/zim/blob/master/build_zim.sh

which generated this:

https://pages.gitlab.io/zim/