With my Yancy documentation site built, with a custom landing page and a POD viewer, I just need to deploy the site. I could deploy the site using hypnotoad, Mojolicious's preforking server with hot deployment, but that would require me to have a server and keep it online. It'd be a lot better if I could just deploy a static website to Github like all the cool people are doing.

But to do that, I'd need to take my dynamic website and turn it into a static one, and that's impossible! Or is it? Why am I asking me, when I'm the one who wrote a way to do it: The Mojolicious export command.

The export command takes a set of paths as input, fetches those pages, and writes the result to a directory. It then looks at all the links on those pages and writes those pages, too. In this way, it exports an entire Mojolicious website as static files.

All I need to do to be able to use the export command is to install it:

$ cpanm Mojolicious::Command::export

Once it's installed, we now have the export command in our application which I can use like any other Mojolicious command.

$ ./myapp.pl export

By default, the export command tries to export the home page (/) and works recursively from there. If I have pages that aren't linked from other places, I should (a) probably add some links to that page, but (b) can just add it to the list of pages to export:

$ ./myapp.pl export / /private

Since I'm hosting this site under a directory in my personal website, I need to use the --base option to rewrite all the internal links to the correct path, and I can use the --to option to write directly to the web server's directory:

$ ./myapp.pl export --base /yancy --to /var/www/preaction.me/yancy

And, if I want, I can use the Mojolicious Config plugin to change the default settings, including what pages to export, the export directory, and a base URL.

The best part is that the export command handles redirects. So, when we're using the PODViewer plugin and get redirected to MetaCPAN, the page gets updated with the redirected location!

In the future it'd be nice if this command were made into a plugin so that it could have hooks for customizing the exported content or additional checks for broken links. If anyone is interested in helping out with this work, let me know and I can help get them started!

Now, with the Yancy CMS, the PODViewer plugin, and the Mojolicious export command, I've got a good-looking documentation website for Yancy! View the full, completed application.