metalsmith-remote-json-to-files

Fetch JSON from remote URLs, transform and inject as files into metalsmith pipeline

Installation

npm install --save-dev metalsmith-remote-json-to-files

Usage

There are 2 ways of using this plugin:

• Simplified via configuration object
• Using a callback function

Configuration object

Configuration object should include following keys:

• url — [String] URL to fetch from
• transformOpts.filename — [String] A string to interpolate the resulting filename from
• transformOpts.contents — [String] A string to interpolate the contents of the file from

So, if the endpoint in the url returns something like:

[{
    name: 'item1',
    body: 'content1'
}, {
    name: 'item2',
    body: 'content2'
}]

the configuration object should look like:

{
    "url": [URL],
    "transformOpts": {
        "filename": "${name}.html",
        "contents": "${body}"
    }
}

Example

Generate static pages from GitHub releases for this project.

Using metalsmith.json

{
  "source": "src",
  "destination": "build",
  "plugins": {
    "metalsmith-remote-json-to-files": {
      "url": "https://api.github.com/repos/okonet/metalsmith-remote-json-to-files/releases",
      "transformOpts": {
        "filename": "${name}.html",
        "contents": "${body}"
      }
    }
  }
}

This should generate a page for each release from this repository with the contents of the release. Visit https://github.com/okonet/metalsmith-remote-json-to-files/releases to compare.

Same results can be aichived using Node.js API

const metalsmith = require('metalsmith')
const remote = require('metalsmith-remote-json-to-files')
 
metalsmith(__dirname)
    .use(remote({
        url: 'https://api.github.com/repos/okonet/metalsmith-remote-json-to-files/releases',
        "transformOpts": {
            filename: '${name}.html',
            contents: '${body}'
        }
    }))
    .build(function(err) {
        if (err) throw err;
    })

If you have more advanced usa case, you can always opt-out for using a callback function. This function must return an array of objects with at least filename and contents keys set. But you can add whatever you want to it and when combine with different metalsmith plugins.