SiteGen

SiteGen is a .NET-based static site generator.

Features

• Markdown support
• Syntax Highlighting
  • Pygments
  • Prism.js
  • Monaco
• Mermaid diagrams
• Razor templates
• Rich site hierarchy model, for building navigation in your templates
• Table of Contents
• Extensible

Get Started

In your ASP.NET website, reference SiteGen.Core.

Example Programs.cs:

using SiteGen.Core;
using SiteGen.Core.Configuration;

var builder = WebApplication.CreateBuilder(args);

builder.Services.AddControllersWithViews();

builder.Services.ConfigureSiteGen();

var settings = new SiteGenSettings();
builder.Configuration.Bind(settings);
builder.Services.AddSingleton(settings);

var app = builder.Build();

if (!app.Environment.IsDevelopment())
{
    app.UseExceptionHandler("/Home/Error");
    app.UseHsts();
}

app.UseStaticFiles();
app.UseRouting();
app.UseAuthorization();

app.UseSiteGen();

app.Run();

Configure paths in appsettings.json:

{
  "ContentPaths": [ "content" ],
  "StaticPaths": [ "static", "wwwroot" ]
}

Add your .md files into the content folder, and your static assets in static or wwwroot.

Add a Page.cshtml to 'Pages/Shared' (for Razor Pages) or 'Views/Home' or 'Views/Shared' (for MVC) folder.

You should remove the @page directive from the top of the Page.cshtml file, as SiteGen will handle routing for you.

If you generate client-side css and javascript, you can distribute your built artifacts to either the static or wwwroot folders.

In your Razor views, you can reference the ViewBag.Root for the base node of the website, and use the .Tree property to crawl the site hierarchy.

Building and publishing

• Install the SiteGen tool

dotnet new tool-manifest
dotnet tool install --local SiteGen.Cli --prerelease

• Launch your website and bind to port :5000
• Run dotnet sitegen to crawl your site and publish the static resources to /public

How it works

SiteGen registers itself as a default fallback route. This allows your website to implement its own routes which will take precedence.

By default, SiteGen will generate a site map from the markdown files it finds in the configured content directories.

The SiteGen fallback route it for its in-built HomeController and Page action. This is why you must implement a default Page.cshtml view.

Services

Interactive, hosted browser scraping with Playwright

Playwright can be used to dynamically scrape pages and sites and even do things like invoke javascript.

Singleton instances of IPlaywright (main Playwright service), and a keyed singleton instance of IBrowser (key of "Chromium") are injected.

These hosts are used to dynamically host and invoke syntax highlighters like Monaco Editor and Prism.js.