What makes Accelerate different from other static site generators? Well, it actually is a static site generator!
If you think about the other static site generators that you have heard of or used, like Jekyll, Gatsby, Next.js etc, are they really static site generators? Or are they more like static site frameworks?
We tried several of them to manage our customers many sites but always got into the same problems: maintainability and flexibility.
If your site is built in a static site framework and you have to keep it updated that means updating the framework as well. Anyone that has spent any time in the Node ecosystem will know that semver is more a loose suggestion to many package maintainers and that your stack might break during what should be a safe update.
There is also the bigger question of what you do with your 200 sites when a new version comes out ... Update them all right then - possibly weeks of unpaid work - or wait until you touch the site next time - possibly years from now and likely days of work to get it up to date.
We figured there must be a better way.
To minimize overhead when switching between customer projects you ideally want the boilerplate between sites to be identical. But what do you do when a customer needs something that is outside of the normal boilerplate?
We have normally solved it in one of two ways - depending on how likely it is that the change will be relevant for other customers - add the new dependency to the boilerplate and increase complexity and maintenance work forever, or add it as a special dependency to that specific site and diverge that site from the norm, increasing FTWs per hour and contextual load forever ...
(Sometimes we have also hacked "clever" solutions using the limited logic in the template language, but let us not talk about that here ...)
With Acc we are trying to take another approach to our sites entirely. Instead of relying on complex dependancies and logic in the site repo itself, we want to keep the site repo as clean as possible while allowing for all the flexibility when building each site.
So Acc is a build pipeline. It reads a raw HTML, CSS and JS repo + a build pipeline config. Each step in the pipeline has access to the result of the processing so far and can add/change whatever part of the state it wants to.
The pipeline consists of a number of Nimscript scripts that are called in sequence. Each of these have access to the shared state and can pull from it or push to it as well as execute external commands.
The script based plugin system means that you can pull from basically anything. All you need is a small Nimscript plugin that interfaces Acc with whatever you want to use as a source.
You can pull from an external API with curl, a database locally or through an SSH tunnel from a server, local files or anything else that you can get access to.
The nice thing with the shared state and small script wrappers is that it makes it really easy to integrate whatever tools you like the best into the build. No fixed dependencies or complicated configurations where it is unclear what actually happens and in what order.
The wrappers are small and easy to understand and the rest is up to you!
Like with sources the processing is up to you. If you like React and JSX you can
build your site in that, leave templated sections in the code, pull in the info
from external sources at build time and finish by calling yarn build on the
original React project.
One of the biggest problems we wanted to solve was maintenance. If you only run one or a couple of sites in something like Gatsby this is not much of a problem. But if you manage hundreds of sites for clients and like to get paid for your time it is.
With the external build pipeline approach we only have to keep the core API stable, or backwards compatible using a config version string, to be able to run a new build - with a new version of the core - on every site no matter how old.
Plugins can easily be added or changed over time. Think about things like rendering social media tags from the site config for example. Today you might have plugins to render for Facebook and Twitter, but in a year there might be a new site that everyone needs to support... Simply add a new section to your global config for the new sites plugin and rebuild all the sites and presto! New social media links on all sites for the price of updating in one place...
With a global and per site config you regain the flexibility to do global changes, like above, while keeping it easy for one site to override the globals in its config for some purpose.
You can also keep all the tools in only two places: the build image for all the global plugins and in the repo for any specialized ones.
The nature of the setup even allows your sites to pull external resources during build if they need some specialized executable for example. At your own risk of cause, but at least there is an easy escape hatch for the places where you need one.
Clone then run using nimble -d:debug -d:nimDebugDlOpen -p:src --threads:on --mm:orc --deepcopy:on run acc dev ../test_site
The acc run -d ../test_site ../test_site/plugins/test.nims part of the command
is the binary to build/run and the arguments to it.
nimble build -d:release -p:src --threads:on --mm:orc --deepcopy:on