Leveraging sous on my website

I was recently inspired by the Menu page on friend and colleague Brandon Rozek’s website to implement something similar here. I already had a collection of sous recipes used to generate a printable PDF, and I figured that using the templated output feature in 0.3.0 would make this fairly trivial.

Generating Hugo content pages with sous Link to heading

First, I added a new cookbook section to my Hugo site, with a simple index page and the necessary snippets to list any pages in that section. Next, I created a separate repository for my existing sous recipes[^1] and added it as a submodule. Next, a basic recipe.md template:

[1]: At least, the ones I felt were ready for public consumption.

---
title: "{{ name }}"
---

**{{ servings }} servings | {{ prep_minutes }} prep minutes | {{ cook_minutes }} cook minutes**

{% if url %}**Adapted from [{{ author }}]({{ url }})**{% endif %}

## Ingredients

{% for ingredient in ingredients %}* {% if ingredient.amount %}{{ ingredient.amount }} {% endif %}{% if ingredient.unit %}{{ ingredient.unit }} {% endif %}{{ ingredient.name }}
{% endfor %}

## Method

{% for step in steps %}{{ loop.index }}. {{ step }}
{% endfor %}

The template populates the title field for Hugo, places the rest of the metadata below (only displaying the author if there is also a source URL present), and formats the body of the recipe as one would expect.

Finally, to generate the Markdown content pages for Hugo:

$ sous -m template -t ./recipe.md -o ./content/cookbook/ ./cookbook/

Integrating sous into the build process Link to heading

Next, I needed to automate running sous to generate the recipe content pages. Currently, I build my website as an OCI image that gets deployed with Podman. Using the official Rust image as a base, getting a working copy of sous to do this with is easy:

FROM docker.io/rust:1.68 as sous

RUN cargo install --version ~0.3 sous
COPY ./cookbook /cookbook
COPY ./recipe.md /recipe.md
RUN sous -m template -t recipe.md -o output/ cookbook/

The Hugo stage can then grab the generated files before building:

FROM docker.io/alpine:edge as hugo

RUN apk add hugo
RUN hugo version

COPY . /src
COPY --from=sous /output/* /src/content/cookbook/
WORKDIR /src
RUN hugo --minify

While I’m largely pleased with how I’ve set this up, the Containerfile does leave some room for optimization in a few ways. Most notably, building sous from source is a fairly expensive operation to perform on every website update. To alleviate this I’ll likely create a separate image for this purpose.

In any case, a handful of recipes are now available in the Cookbook section, with more to come as I clean up more of my existing ones for publishing.