Pre Generate Hook

Step one in EJS Site Builder's workflow is to give you the opportunity to create global data for all your templates. You can also use it to render a page.

In order to do so, you must create a file called "preGenerate.ejs" in your templates directory.

The script itself can be quite simple. It can use any javascript (as well as using npm node.js modules you add to your project). It behaves similiarly to a javascript promise, in that it can either resolve or reject. See EJS Site Builder scripting basics for details.

Here's an example of a script to create a site map, based on the project that created these docs, assuming all previous pages wrote to a toc object in global data:

preGenerate.ejs

<script generate>
  async () => {
    const now = calcalateMyBuildDate();
    const version = await getGitTagVersion();

    const toLowerCase = function (text) {
      return text.toLowerCase();
    };

    return {
      siteFiles: {
        "/version.json": {
          createdDate: now,
          version: version,
        },
      },
      global: {
        date: now,
        toLowerCase: toLowerCase, // can even pass functions to global data
      },
    };
  };
</script>

Outputs

// things you can return from a generator script:
type GeneratorResponse = {
  cache: CacheData;
  siteFiles: { [key: Path]: unknown };
  watchFiles: Path[];
  watchGlobs: string[];
  global: PageData; // only valid from pregenerat
};

Note: EJS Site Builder auto dependency tracking will track to see which data you actually use in your templates. If you make changes to preGenerate.ejs while EJS Site Builder is running, it will only re-generate the pages that used any global data.