All About Cobalt

Author: Harry Min Khant

Published on:

Total words: 523

Reading time: 3minute

Cobalt is a static site generator written in Rust language powered by Liquid as its templating engine.

It is one of the well-known static site generators available today, designed to be easy, flexible, and lightweight. You write your site's content in Markdown, and Cobalt will build the site for you as HTML files, ready to be served on your server. While other static site generators are available, they are not as simple as Cobalt, which requires no additional libraries to install. This makes it a perfect, time-saving solution for speed, stability, clean layouts, and ease of use.

Features

• Simple: Cobalt will help you get up and running quickly but scales to handle your more complex cases.
• Easy: Cobalt tries to be no-hassle, from being easy to install, a workflow-centric command line, to a familiar template language.
• Fast: Written in Rust, Cobalt is blazing fast and allows you to quickly see the results of your work.
• Custom data: Use custom data files to efficiently represent your site, making it faster and easier to maintain data across the site. For example, you can manage page navigation, authors, and other essential data that may change over time.
• Open source: Contribute to Cobalt in any way you like if it doesn't contain the features you need or if you found a bug. Make sure to review their contribution guidelines first before you interact with any contribution methods so you will have information on how you can contribute to it.

Installation

Cobalt doesn't need to be installed. Just download an available release and extract the zip. Make sure to create a folder named cobalt in a suitable location on your disk, typically where you plan to store the Cobalt executable. Place all files in this folder; only cobalt.exe is required, while other files and folders are optional.

On Windows, it is recommended to add the cobalt executable to the environment variable.

1. Search for "Environment" in the Start menu and click on Edit the system environment variables.
2. In the System Properties window, click Environment Variables, then click New.
3. In the Variable name field, type cobalt or any name you prefer. This will be used to interact with Cobalt.
4. Click Browse File, and select the Cobalt executable file.
5. Save all the changes you made to the environment variables.

To interact with cobalt, you can use %your_cobalt_var_name, for example, %cobalt%.

Usage

Navigate to the directory where you want Cobalt to build your site.

Next, press F4 to open the address bar, select all the text, and delete it. Then, type cmd and press Enter.

You are now in the Command Prompt window. We will refer to this as the Command Prompt window, so make sure to remember how to access it as described in the steps above.

init

Type the following command in your Command Promt window.

%cobalt% init

Output:

Created new project at ./

For more information on its usage, please visit the official website above.