Workflow

In the course of generating your site, EJS Site Builder goes through three phases:

1. Pre Generation
2. Page Generation
3. Post Generation

Each phase has hooks where you write javascript and provide templates in order to manipulate and render the data your customers ultimately experience on your website.

Pre Generation

The PreGenerate Hook is your first chance to load and massage data that you'll use to render your pages. You might read files or pull data from your APIs before getting it ready for all of your pages. You often don't need to use this hook, as you're also allowed to ping apis directly during page generation.

But for example, perhaps you call a headless wordpress API to download blog data. You'd likely write simple javascript to parse the data, order it, tag it, convert it, cache it, etc, before rendering all the pages.

Or consider the simple case where you want to use the version from your latest git tag to pass to all pages. No need to do that on every page generation.

If you need data that will likely be used across multiple pages, the pre generation hook is the place to fetch and prepare it.

For data that you only need on a single page (or group of pages generated from a single template), you can do so in the page generation phase.

Page Generation

EJS Site Builder runs through all your templates, each one generating one or more rendered pages.

Each template can have its own hook called a generate script. Generate scripts are used primarily when you want to spit out multiple pages using the same template.

For example, you could write a template to render a blog post with a consistent style and layout, with a generate script that feeds the data you pull down from your headless api through the template for each post.

Templates have access to anything you supply as global data from the PreGenerate Hook, front matter data, and of course data passed from generate scripts.

Post Generation

The PostGenerate Hook can be very useful, but you may not need it at first. It's a hook where EJS Site Builder sends you information regarding everything that was written by EJS Site Builder to your file system while generating your site, for any purposes you might need, and you also receive global data that was collected through the build process.

For example, perhaps you want to create a site manifest, or perhaps to format the MPA entry points for the vite configuration file for production builds.

Watch Phase

After a site build is completed, EJS Site Builder will by default watch your source files for any changes, triggering a re-generate for anything that was updated, or depended on what was updated.