Catalog

Online Documentation.

Catalog does compile-time transformation and processing of data and content files in your codebase and embeds the result into the module in which it was used.

It intends to make integrating non-code files within your Elixir projects as pleasant as a developer experience as possible, taking inspiration from the seamless integration static site generators provide for editing in-repo data and content files.

It supports the following content types:

• markdown/3
• json/3
• csv/3
• file/3
• yaml/3
• toml/3

Comparison to other approaches

Because the content is preprocessed at compile time, any expensive transformations are no longer done at runtime, such as transforming markdown to HTML in response to a web request. Likewise, since everything is stored in memory, no disk lookups need to be made to access the processed entries. This compile-time approach means any processing are easily detected during development or in a basic CI system, instead of encountering issues in response to a request or at boot time.

Example

We can install Catalog into our application by updating our deps() in our mix.exs to include :catalog. Since we will be processing markdown files here with Toml frontmatter, we will also need to install :earmark and :toml, respectively.

def deps() do
  [
    {:catalog, "~> 0.1.1"},
    {:earmark, "~> 1.4"},
    {:toml, "~> 0.6.2"}
  ]
end

With that done, we can define a new module in our application:

defmodule MyApp.Catalog do
  use Catalog

  markdown(:posts, "posts/**.md")

  def all_posts(), do: @posts
end

In the example above, we defined a new module for our Elixir application, MyApp.Catalog, that will serve as the API for our processed assets. We then use the markdown/2 macro, specifying first the name of the module attribute, :posts, we want to stored the processed markdown file, then specifying the wildcard path for where those files are stored, "posts/**.md".

If our specified directory has only the following markdown file at posts/hello.md:

+++
author = "Kevin Lang"
title = "Hello World"
date: 2021-08-19
+++
This is a markdown *document*.

Then the @posts attribute above will look like the following:

[%{
  content: "<p>\nThis is a markdown <em>document</em>.</p>\n"
  frontmatter: %{
    author: "Kevin Lang",
    title: "Hello World",
    date: ~D[2021-08-19]
  },
  path: "posts/hello.md"
}]

We can customize how we build each entry by specifying our own :build option.

defmodule MyApp.Catalog.Post
  @enforce_keys [:id, :author, :title, :date, :content]
  defstruct [:id, :author, :title, :date, :content]

  def build(path, frontmatter, content) do
    [id] = path |> Path.rootname() |> Path.split() |> Enum.take(-1)
    struct!(__MODULE__, [id: id, content: content] ++ Map.to_list(frontmatter))
  end
end

Then our @posts attribute will look like:

[%MyApp.Catalog.Post{
  id: "hello",
  content: "<p>\nThis is a markdown <em>document</em>.</p>\n",
  date: ~D[2021-08-19],
  title: "Hello World",
  author: "Kevin Lang"
}]

Additionally, we can add syntax highlighting and customize our markdown to HTML transformation. See markdown/2 for more info.

Using and modifying the module attribute

After the module attribute is defined, as shown in the example above, you may want to modify it further. For example, you may want to sort all of the @posts according to their date. This can be done like so:

defmodule MyApp.Catalog do
  use Catalog

  markdown(:posts, "posts/**.md")

  # The @posts variable is first defined by the markdown macro above.
  # Let's further modify it by sorting all posts by descending date.
  @posts Enum.sort_by(@posts, & &1.date, {:desc, Date})

  def all_posts(), do: @posts
end

Important: Avoid injecting the @posts attribute into multiple functions, as each call will make a complete copy of all posts. For example, if you want to show define recent_posts() as well as all_posts(), DO NOT do this:

def all_posts, do: @posts
def recent_posts, do: Enum.take(@posts, 3)

Instead do this:

def all_posts, do: @posts
def recent_posts, do: Enum.take(all_posts(), 3)

Frontmatter

All of our content types support frontmatter. Frontmatter is a block at the top of your content file that contains additional data about the file. They are commonly used for markdown files, but are supported for all of our macros.

TOML frontmatter

TOML frontmatter can be used by specifying a TOML block fenced in by the +++ seperator.

+++
hello = "toml"
+++
This markdown *document* has TOML frontmatter!

TOML frontmatter is processed by the Toml libary. To use TOML frontmatter, Toml must be added as a dependency:

{:toml, "~> 0.6.2"}

You can customize the TOML processing by providing :toml_options in your macro call, which will be passed along to Toml.decode!/1.

Elixir frontmatter

Elixir frontmatter can be used by including Elixir code fenced in by the === seperator.

===
%{
  hello: "elixir"
}
===
This markdown *document* has Elxiir frontmatter!

The code in the block is passed to Code.eval_string/1. It must return a Map.

YAML frontmatter (not recommended)

You can use YAML frontmatter by specifying a YAML block fenced in by the --- seperator.

---
hello: yaml
---
This markdown *document* has YAML frontmatter!

YAML frontmatter is processed by the YamlElixir libary. To use YAML frontmatter, YamlElixir must be added as a dependency:

{:yaml_elixir, "~> 2.8"}

You can customize the YAML processing by providing :yaml_options in your macro call, which will be passed along to YamlElixir.read_from_string!/2.

Unfortunately, this library does not allow us to have the keys returned as atoms instead of strings, which makes it slightly more cumbersome to use. Because of this, we do not recommend using YAML frontmatter.

Live reloading

If you are using Phoenix, you can enable live reloading by simply telling Phoenix to watch the “posts” directory. Open up "config/dev.exs", search for live_reload: and add this to the list of patterns:

live_reload: [
  patterns: [
    ...,
    ~r"posts/*/.*(md)$"
  ]
]

Credits

This work draws heavily on the NimblePublisher library by Dashbit.