JBake is a “Java based, open source, static site generator” (http://jbake.org/, on github https://github.com/jbake-org/jbake). It is a great choice if you want to create static HTML websites. No slow loading of dynamic content anymore. Additionally, if a site is created on load by JavaScript, issues with indexing and search engine optimization/SEO might occur. This is not a problem with static sites. At the same time different template engines like FreeMarker (http://freemarker.org/) help you modularize the website. You only have to define menu and footer once and they will be inserted automatically.

JBake was perfect for us to create a microsite with 15 different pages and lots of reappearing elements. We integrated JBake into Maven to create a comfortable release process. To do this we used the plug-in jbake-maven-plugin (https://github.com/ingenieux/jbake-maven-plugin). This sample project shows the fundamental integration: https://github.com/ingenieux/jbake-sample.

While integrating JBake into Maven you have to consider a few things. For our site we used Maven-3.0.5, JDK-1.7.0-71 and jbake-maven-plugin-0.0.3, because we had version conflicts with other combinations (newer version of jbake-maven-plugin need Maven-3.1.1).

This is the plug-in configuration of the pom.xml

<plugin>
    <groupId>br.com.ingenieux</groupId>
    <artifactId>jbake-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.3</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>default-generate</id>
            <phase>generate-resources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>generate</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
    <configuration>
        <inputDirectory>${project.basedir}/src/main/resources</inputDirectory>
        <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/classes</outputDirectory>
    </configuration>
    <dependencies>
        <!-- for freemarker templates (.ftl) -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.freemarker</groupId>
            <artifactId>freemarker</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.20</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

In detail:

The dependencies need the definition of the template engine, FreeMarker in this case.

<dependencies>
    <!-- for freemarker templates (.ftl) -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.freemarker</groupId>
        <artifactId>freemarker</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.20</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

The configuration of the directories is very important. Per default the jbake-maven-plugin uses the path src/main/jbake. This doesn’t go well with the default path src/main/resources, which is used by lots of other plug-ins. Additionally, all the freshly baked goods are supposed to end up in the /classes directory.

<configuration>
    <inputDirectory>${project.basedir}/src/main/resources</inputDirectory>
    <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}/classes</outputDirectory>
</configuration>

After that everything can be packaged and we can ignore all the files that aren’t needed anymore. To do this we configured the jar-plugin (or zip, depending on what you use). The source files of /assets, /content and /templates can be excluded (the .less files are from LESS integration, not from JBake. The template-draft.html is an internal template that shouldn’t end up on the server).

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.4</version>
    <configuration>
        <excludes>
            <exclude>**/less</exclude>
            <exclude>**/*.less</exclude>
            <exclude>**/assets</exclude>
            <exclude>**/assets/**</exclude>
            <exclude>**/content</exclude>
            <exclude>**/content/**</exclude>
            <exclude>**/templates</exclude>
            <exclude>**/templates/**</exclude>
            <exclude>**/template-draft.html</exclude>
        </excludes>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

And that was it. With a mvn clean install we can easily bake together all content files and the result is a static site.

Happy baking!