Making plugins

Blades has a versatile extension system, where a plugin can be written in any language that can read from standard input and write to the standard output. Each plugin is run at the appropriate stage of site rendering.

Check out the already made plugins.

There are 4 types of plugins that can be used with Blades.

• input - they put a JSON-serialised list of pages on the standard output, can be used to get pages from different sources
• output - they receive a JSON-serialised list of pages on the standard input and can be used to generate further page data, such as processed images
• transform - they receive a JSON-serialised list of pages on the standard input and output another such list on the standard output, can transform anything on the pages
• content - they receive a markdown content of one page on standard input and output markdown on the standard output; they are enabled on per-page basis

The plugins can be set up in the config.

Serialised page data

All the data specified on every page is available in the serialised list of pages. It contains only the fields that were explicitly set, so no field can be assumed to be present or non-present.

For Rust, Blades also provides a library for automatic serialisation and deserialisation of pages. Currently, Cargo doesn’t support binary-only dependencies. As such, these dependencies are behind the bin feature gate, which is enabled by default. When using Blades as a library, they are not necessary, so it is recommended to import blades with default_features = false.

blades = { version = "0.3", default_features = false }

Example

An example plugin can be found in the Blades repository in the examples directory. To try it, clone it and downolad the theme as a submodule

git clone https://github.com/grego/blades
cd blades
git submodule update --init

Then build the plugin:

cargo build --release transform_plugin

Then run Blades in the examples directory:

cd examples
cargo run --release

Or check some real plugins.