luatml

a simple lua static html generator.

for a quick introduction, head over to the quickstart section!

rationale

for most of my use-cases the web development tools i encountered are not pleasant to work with and turn web development into a surprisingly burdensome task that requires me to spend more time learning and fighting the tools rather than focussing on the content itself. that i perceive as time wasted.

what is luatml

• a lua library and domain-specific language to write html, with handy utility functions.
• a cli tool to translate this "lua-html" to static html.
• and a small set of guidelines, recommendations and examples

quickstart

there are a few ways to use luatml, all of them boil down to the core feature: converting lua to html. this example does focus only on that part.

1. download and compile[1] the luatml cli program

$ git clone https://github.com/numpad/luatml.git
$ cd luatml/
$ make

3. create a new lua file helloworld.lua and copy the code below.

4. translate the file to html and save it: ./luatml build helloworld.lua > index.html.

5. view the index.html in a browser.

   [1]: compiling luatml requires a C99 compliant compiler and lua.

-- helloworld.lua

require 'luatml'
luatml_registertags()

return html {
    head {
        meta { charset="utf-8" },
        title "a very simple website",
        style [[
            .subtitle {
                color: #444;
            }
        ]]
    },
    body {
        h1 "hello, world!",
        p {
            "there's not much more to luatml :)",
            class = "subtitle"
        },
    }
}

syntax

luatml is plain-old lua, mostly just making use of the languages optional parenthesis.

HTML	luatml translation
<p>Hello World</p>	p "Hello World", p("Hello World") or p { "Hello World" }
<p style="color: red;">Hello World</p>	p { "Hello World", style="color: red;" }
<button hx-post="/clicked">Click me</button>	button { "Click me", ["hx-post"]="/clicked" }
<ul><li>first</li><li>second</li></ul>	ul { li "first", li "second" }
<MyCustomTag></MyCustomTag>	luatml_tag"MyCustomTag" {}