The init command

The init command prepares the current directory with data and configuration files needed by Fossilzer. It's used like so:

mkdir my-mastodon-site
cd my-mastodon-site
fossilizer init

When using the init command for the first time, some files and directories will be set up for you:

my-mastodon-site/
└── build
└── data
    └── data.sqlite3

• The build directory is where your static site will be generated

• The data/data.sqlite3 file is a SQLite database into which things like posts and user account data will be stored.

After you've run this command, you can try the import command to ingest data from one or more Mastodon exports.

Options

--clean

The --clean flag will delete existing build and data directories before setting things up. Be careful with this, because it will wipe out any existing data!

fossilizer init --clean

--customize

By default, Fossilzer will use templates and assets embedded in the executable to generate a static web site. However, if you'd like to customize how your site is generated, you can extract these into external files to edit:

fossilizer init --customize

This will result in a file structure something like this:

my-mastodon-site/
└── build
└── data
    └── media
    ├── config.toml
    ├── data.sqlite3
    └── themes
        └── default
            ├── templates
            │   ├── activity.html
            │   ├── day.html
            │   ├── index.html
            │   └── layout.html
            └── web
                ├── index.css
                └── index.js

• The config.toml file can be used to supply configuration settings

• The data/themes directory holds themes that can be used to customize the appearance of the site. The default theme is provided by default. If you want to use a different theme, you can copy the default directory and modify it under a directory with a different name. This name, then, can be supplied to the build command with the --theme option.

• The data/themes/default/templates directory holds Tera templates used to generate HTML pages.

• The data/themes/default/web directory holds web assets which will be copied into the root directory of your static site when it's generated.

TODO: Need to document configuration settings and templates. For now, just play around with the templates used by cli/build.rs and see what happens! 😅 Configuration settings can be found in the config.rs module