PFT-MAKE(1)

pft-make(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the User Contributed Perl Documentation corner of the universe — this is the manual for pft make, and yes it's giving main character energy, come sit with me 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

pft make — build the PFT website 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pft make

that's it. that's the whole vibe. no flags, no chaos, just the one command 🎀

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So this command takes literally all the content chillin' inside the ROOT/content directory and turns it into HTML. All of it. No cap.

First the content gets organized into an internal graph representation — think of it like a little friendship web, where every entry knows exactly which other entries refer to it 👑. Then each node of that graph gets mapped onto an HTML template, and saved into the ROOT/build directory. During this whole glow-up process, any unresolved links get reported to you via standard error, so you're never left guessing 🙈.

🧚 Templates and expansions 🧚

HTML templates must live in the ROOT/templates directory. That's their home, bestie, don't relocate them 💜.

The template engine in play here is Template::Alloy. In a nutshell (a very cute nutshell), it lets you expand simple code blocks inside an HTML (or text) skeleton, like for example:

<title>[% site.title %]</title>

Loops and conditionals are also supported, so you can go full goblin mode with logic if you want. Check the Template::Alloy user manual for the whole supported mini-language, iykyk ✨.

A bunch of pre-defined templates get installed by default during the initialization process (peep pft-init(1)) — so you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from slay 💚.

💜 The output website 💜

The output encoding depends on a configuration key in pft.yaml (again, see pft-init(1)). The template is expected to define the encoding in a proper way — and by "proper way" we mean by making use of the [% site.encoding %] key in the HTML header, like so:

<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type"
      content="text/html; charset=[% site.encoding %]">
...
</head>

The result of a build is a collection of HTML pages. And here's the iconic part: since a href links are relative, the generated site will work fine even if it gets moved or copied remotely onto another system (see pft-pub(1)) 🦋. It's portable, it's flexible, it ate 💅.

🎀 Injected data 🎀

The pft make command will populate the ROOT/build directory.

Got extra static data you wanna inject into the resulting website? Drop it in the ROOT/inject directory. This handles the super common requirement of placing additional files in the root directory of online websites — the typical case being the .htaccess file of Apache. Classic 🙈.

Here's how the link situation goes down, in order, like a little priority list:

1. The pft-make(1) command will first attempt to hard-link the injected files, from ROOT/inject to ROOT/build.
2. If that fails (e.g. because hard-links are not supported by the filesystem), soft-links are attempted.
3. If nothing else succeeds, pft make will make a copy of each injected file.

so basically it's gonna link you one way or another, bestie. it's persistent like that 🔥.

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💖 OPTIONS 💖

• --help — show this guide. that's the one and only, and honestly? iconic minimalism.

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💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

• 1 in case of option parsing failure. 💀
• 2 if it was impossible to construct the filesystem tree. 😭
• 3 in case of corrupt configuration. 🙈

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

• pft(1)
• pft-gen-rss(1)
• pft-init(1)

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! go build something gorgeous, you've got this 🫶✨💅

mwah 💋 — this was perl v5.42.0, dated 2025-07-25, signing off from the PFT-MAKE(1) chapter of the User Contributed Perl Documentation. periodt. 🎀