metalsmith-cockpit

Introduction

The idea behind this example is to generate a static blog site with Metalsmith using posts data defined in Cockpit.

The plugin metalsmith-remote-json-to-files is used to fetch JSON data from Cockpit, transform and inject as files into metalsmith pipeline.

Cockpit is a great open source tool that allows non technical people to write content in a WYSIWYG way.

Instructions:

npm install
npm run start

This will install all the dependencies and will generate in the build directory the static HTML files.

The command looks for an environment variable called COKPIT_POSTS_URL; if this variable is not found or is empty, some default fake data will be used.

Once you have your Cockpit installation running, define a Collection for the posts (for example, Post); the Fields I used are pretty standard for a post:

• Title

• Date

• Language

• Category

• Image

• Excerpt

• Content

• Tags

• Published

Now you can define the environment variable COKPIT_POSTS_URL to point to your installation.

For example, if your domain is example.com and your collection is named Post, the variable can be defined as:

COKPIT_POSTS_URL=https://example.com/api/collections/get/Post

Probably your data will be private, so you'll define an API Token (TOKEN) with Cockpit installation; also, you'll want to publish only posts that have the published flag as true:

COKPIT_POSTS_URL=https://example.com/api/collections/get/Post?token=TOKEN&filter%5Bpublished%5D=true

You can then deploy your static website to Netlify.