Sources

Sources are the part of a content model that specifies where PieCrust will find your content. This is done in the website configuration:

site:
    sources:
        foo:
            type: posts/flat
        bar:
            type: default

As shown above, the site/sources setting must contain a map of the sources you want: each source’s name, followed by its settings.

Usually, a source will be a directory in the website’s root directory, in which you’ll put text files often following some kind of naming convention.

Source settings depend on the type of the source, but all sources have some common settings. All settings are optional except for type.

  • type: This defines what kind of backend you want for a source. See the list of sources for the source types that ship with PieCrust. You can also get more source types by installing plugins.

  • fs_endpoint: Most sources will read their data from the file-system. By default, the file-system directory will be a sub-directory of the website’s root with the same name as the source’s name. This can be customized with the fs_endpoint setting, which is specified relative to the website root.

  • data_endpoint: Most sources will also want to expose all their pages to a template data endpoint, so you can easily iterate on them – for example to show an archive or a site map. By default, this endpoint is the same as the source’s name, but it can be customized with the data_endpoint setting. For more information on data providers, see the reference page.

  • data_type: The data that’s exposed through the data_endpoint is an iterator by default, which means it’s a simple flat list of pages. There are other possible forms, like for example a blog archive, which is a bunch of different iterators rolled into the endpoint, with easy ways to list pages by year or by month.

For an example of sources configuration, see the default content model.