In the first 3 parts of this tutorial, we made a pretty blog. But it’s not really worth much if nobody can see it, so here we’ll talk about how we can bake it and publish it. This is where we put the “static” in “static website generator”.
Baking
“Baking” is what we call the act of transforming your pages, posts, and layouts into static HTML files.
It’s almost as if someone was to request every possible page in your website, and save the result to separate HTML files whose filenames and directories match the URL they were requested from. This is not what happens in reality when you bake with PieCrust, but that’s fairly equivalent.
You can bake your website by simply running:
$ chef bake
[ 2.6 ms] cleaned cache (reason: need bake record regeneration)
[ 111.6 ms] [1] about/
[ 115.1 ms] [2] feed.xml/
[ 115.7 ms] [3] 2015/my-first-post/
[ 120.0 ms] [0] /
[ 12.1 ms] [1] 2015/my-second-post/
[ 9.1 ms] [2] 2015/a-third-one/
[ 42.7 ms] [0] tag/foo/
[ 43.4 ms] [1] tag/bar/
[ 53.7 ms] [2] tag/another/
[ 5.8 ms] [0] myblog.less
-------------------------
[ 203.9 ms] done baking
The output is obviously not going to be exactly the same (especially if you created more content while playing around), but it should be equivalent.
The baked website is available in the _counter/ directory.
Publishing
Publishing a static website is a really simple matter: you just upload the static files to a web server.
In our case, this means uploading the contents of the _counter/ directory to
whatever place we have up there in the cloud for such a thing – probably a
machine running an Apache or Nginx web server. You can use FTP/SFTP for
this, with such utilities as Cyberduck, WinSCP, or FileZilla.
Once your files are up, you should be able to see the same things as when you
were previewing them with chef serve.