Using the Library

Add Sherwood as a dependency without the bundled template — you’ll bring your own:

[dependencies]
sherwood = { version = "0.5", default-features = false, features = ["cli"] }
sailfish = "0.11"

Define a template and a render closure, then hand it to run_cli:

use sailfish::TemplateSimple;
use sherwood::{Asset, BuildError, NavItem, Page, PageContext, ParserRegistry, run_cli};

#[derive(TemplateSimple)]
#[template(path = "page.stpl")]
struct PageTemplate<'a> {
    title: &'a str,
    content: &'a str,
    nav: &'a [NavItem],
}

fn render(page: &Page, ctx: &PageContext) -> Result<String, BuildError> {
    PageTemplate {
        title: &page.frontmatter.title,
        content: &page.content_html,
        nav: &ctx.nav,
    }
    .render_once()
    .map_err(|e| BuildError::Render(e.to_string()))
}

fn main() -> std::process::ExitCode {
    run_cli(
        ParserRegistry::default(),
        render,
        vec![Asset::new("style.css", include_str!("../assets/style.css").as_bytes())],
    )
}

That’s the entire site/ binary behind this very site.

The render closure

build_site and run_cli accept any FnMut(&Page, &PageContext) -> Result<String, BuildError>. Each call gets:

• Page — frontmatter (title plus arbitrary fields via frontmatter.get), rendered content_html, optional excerpt_html, and the source/output paths.
• PageContext — the computed nav, breadcrumbs, prev / next neighbours, and the full pages slice (use ctx.pages_under("/blog/") to drive section indexes).

Templates must use TemplateSimple

Sailfish’s TemplateSimple derive destructures struct fields into locals, so the template can reference <%= title %> directly. TemplateOnce does not, and will fail to compile.