Hacking on Hakyll - Part 1

By Beerend Lauwers

Motivation

I wanted to see how hard it was to add some new simple functionality to Hakyll: read a single file containing a list of (Int,Int)’s, one on each line. Then, take the first Int and of each and lump them together. (The idea is to use them to populate a data type later on.)

Start

First, I looked at Hakyll’s documentation on Hackage. Hakyll.Web.CompressCss was very useful to understand how I could lift a pure function to a function that works in Compiler:

(code here)

Writing the readTuples function

So, what I first needed to do was to create the readTuples function:

readTuples :: Compiler (Item String)
readTuples = fmap readTuples' <$> getResourceString

readTuples' :: String -> String
readTuples' xs = 
  let res = map (\x -> (read x)::(Int,Int)) (lines xs)
  in  concatMap (show . fst) res

(I just put this in site.hs, by the way.)

readTuples' is simple: take the file contents (xs) and apply lines to it to get a list of Strings. Then, it reads each String, casting it to an (Int,Int).¹ Finally, the first element of each tuple is taken and turned into a String. All those are then concatenated together.

readTuples then applies the aforementioned function to getResourceString, which provides a String version of the file’s contents.

Using it in the site compiler

We’ll want to use match, because we take an existing file and transform it. So, let’s add this line to main:

match "testing/*" $ do

Then, we need to say where the processed file is going to end up. This is what routes are for. For the moment, I’m just going to modify the file’s contents when building the site, but not its location or name. That’s what idRoute does: just use the same directory and file name as that of the input file.

match "testing/*" $ do
    route idRoute

Then, we need to say what we actually want to do with the file’s contents by using compile:

compile :: Compiler (Item a) -> Rules()

readTuples slots in here nicely:

readTuples :: Compiler (Item String)

So, we end up with:

match "testing/*" $ do
    route idRoute
    compile $ readTuples

That’s it! Recompile site.hs and run it:

ghc --make -fforce-recomp site.hs
site build

Example input

My test file is testing/abcd.txt²:

(1,2)
(4,5)
(6,8)

After compilation, _site/testing/abcd.txt contains:

146

Conclusion

It’s not really so hard! Just define a pure function that does a transformation, lift it to Compiler and pass that to compile.