Update: 8. Feb. 2015 See the Notes section at the end.

Update: 27. Dec 2014

What if you want to create simple pseudo dynamic content within a page or a layout with Hugo, the static site generator?

My idea is: Import any JSON or CSV from any local file or URL and make the JSON or CSV content available in a shortcode or directly in the layout files.

The Go code is currently in my template_resources.go.

How to implement?

Local JSON or CSV files must reside inside Hugos working directory.

As an example I’m using the JSON from my GitHub Stars.

In your markdown template you can e.g. add a short code like:

{{< demoJsonGH url="static/wp-content/uploads/hugo/starred.json" >}}

{{< demoJsonYT url="http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/useryt/uploads?alt=json&max-results=10" >}}

The demoJsonGH short code template is:

<ul class="pinglist">
  {{ $url := .Get "url" }}
  {{ range getJSON $url }}
    {{ $p := . }}
    <li>
      {{$p.language}}: <strong>{{ $p.name }}</strong>
      <a href="{{ $p.html_url }}" target="_blank">{{ $p.full_name }}</a>
      <br>
      Stars: {{$p.stargazers_count}} | Watchers: {{$p.watchers_count}}<br>
      {{ $p.description }}
    </li>
    {{ end }}
</ul>

Parsing JSON results

• CSS: touchstonejs JedWatson/touchstonejs
  Stars: 1064 | Watchers: 1064
  Mobile App Framework powered by React
• CSS: jquery.avgrund.js voronianski/jquery.avgrund.js
  Stars: 1564 | Watchers: 1564
  Avgrund is a jQuery plugin with new modal concept for popups

• Go: dl nf/dl
  Stars: 54 | Watchers: 54
  
• Go: aws-go stripe/aws-go
  Stars: 641 | Watchers: 641
  An incredibly experimental, automatically generated set of AWS clients in Go.
• Go: lane oleiade/lane
  Stars: 77 | Watchers: 77
  A golang queues, stacks and deques implementation library
• Go: go golang/go
  Stars: 4831 | Watchers: 4831
  The Go programming language
• Go: goji zenazn/goji
  Stars: 1857 | Watchers: 1857
  Goji is a minimalistic web framework for Golang that's high in antioxidants
• Go: gox mitchellh/gox
  Stars: 774 | Watchers: 774
  A dead simple, no frills Go cross compile tool
• Go: ioprogress mitchellh/ioprogress
  Stars: 235 | Watchers: 235
  Go (golang) package for progress bars around io.Reader/Writers.
• PHP: mpmd AOEpeople/mpmd
  Stars: 50 | Watchers: 50
  Magento Project Mess Detector (for n98-magerun)
• Go: gometry rakyll/gometry
  Stars: 228 | Watchers: 228
  A visual interface to work with runtime profiling data from Go programs (work-in-progress)
• Objective-C: CotEditor coteditor/CotEditor
  Stars: 1014 | Watchers: 1014
  Lightweight Plain-Text Editor for OS X
• Go: httprouter julienschmidt/httprouter
  Stars: 1041 | Watchers: 1041
  A high performance HTTP request router that scales well
• Go: http2 bradfitz/http2
  Stars: 474 | Watchers: 474
  HTTP/2 support for Go (in active development)
• Go: robotstxt-go temoto/robotstxt-go
  Stars: 62 | Watchers: 62
  The robots.txt exclusion protocol implementation for Go language #golang
• Go: vegeta tsenart/vegeta
  Stars: 2025 | Watchers: 2025
  HTTP load testing tool and library. It's over 9000!
• Go: cron robfig/cron
  Stars: 325 | Watchers: 325
  a cron library for go
• Go: grace facebookgo/grace
  Stars: 515 | Watchers: 515
  Graceful restart for Go servers.
• Go: mysqltest facebookgo/mysqltest
  Stars: 17 | Watchers: 17
  Package mysqltest provides standalone instances of mysql suitable for use in tests.
• Go: ensure facebookgo/ensure
  Stars: 18 | Watchers: 18
  Package ensure provides utilities for testing to ensure the given conditions are met and Fatal if they aren't satisified.
• Go: cockroach cockroachdb/cockroach
  Stars: 2556 | Watchers: 2556
  A Scalable, Geo-Replicated, Transactional Datastore
• Shell: compressed-magento-sample-data Vinai/compressed-magento-sample-data
  Stars: 14 | Watchers: 14
  A highly compressed version of the magento 1.9 sample data and a script to create it.
• Go: delve derekparker/delve
  Stars: 1266 | Watchers: 1266
  Go debugger
• Go: ngrok inconshreveable/ngrok
  Stars: 3863 | Watchers: 3863
  Introspected tunnels to localhost
• JavaScript: dashboards keen/dashboards
  Stars: 4641 | Watchers: 4641
  Responsive dashboard templates for Bootstrap
• Go: sql-migrate rubenv/sql-migrate
  Stars: 206 | Watchers: 206
  SQL schema migration tool for Go.
• Go: boom rakyll/boom
  Stars: 1703 | Watchers: 1703
  HTTP(S) load generator, ApacheBench (ab) replacement, written in Go
• Go: pb cheggaaa/pb
  Stars: 380 | Watchers: 380
  Console progress bar for Golang
• Go: viper spf13/viper
  Stars: 193 | Watchers: 193
  Go configuration with fangs
• Go: go-spew davecgh/go-spew
  Stars: 383 | Watchers: 383
  Implements a deep pretty printer for Go data structures to aid in debugging

Parsing YouTube feed url:

• map[$t:Carols in the Domain, Sydney 2014 type:text]
  
• map[$t:Blow hole at Pancake Rocks, Punakaiki, New Zealand type:text]
  
• map[$t:Blue Mountains Blackheath Grand Canyon Track type:text]
  
• map[$t:Sculptures by the sea 2014 type:text]
  
• map[$t:Blue Mountains View @ Wentworth Falls type:text]
  
• map[$t:Australian Reptile Park: Milking a Sydney Funnel Web Spider type:text]
  
• map[$t:Australian Reptile Zoo: Milking a Costal Taipan type:text]
  
• map[$t:Australian Reptile Zoo: Koalas type:text]
  
• map[$t:Australian Reptile Zoo: Tasmanian Devil feeding an egg type:text]
  

One strange problem occurs when parsing the Youtube API 2.0 (deprecated):

The JSON response looks something like:

  "entry": [
    {
      "id": {"$t": "http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos/XeceUDREW0U"},
      "published": {"$t": "2014-12-20T22:35:14.000Z"},
      "updated": {"$t": "2014-12-20T22:37:03.000Z"},
      "category": [
        {
          "scheme": "http://schemas.google.com/g/2005#kind",
          "term": "http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007#video"
        },
        {
          "scheme": "http://gdata.youtube.com/schemas/2007/categories.cat",
          "term": "Travel",
          "label": "Travel & Events"
        }
      ],
      "title": {
        "$t": "Carols in the Domain, Sydney 2014",
        "type": "text"
      },

The YouTube short code template is:

<ul class="pinglist">
  {{ $url := .Get "url" }}
  {{ $j := getJSON $url }}

  {{ range $j.feed.entry }}
    {{ $v := . }}
    <li>
      {{index $v.title }}<br>
    </li>
  {{ end }}
</ul>

Hugo totally panics and crashes when using: {{$v.title.$t}}.

The best solution should be switching to Youtube API v3.

Or any other ideas?

Parsing CSV

The short code within your page for the CSV looks like:

{{< demoCsv url="static/wp-content/uploads/hugo/SalesJan2009.csv" sep="," >}}

The url can be a local or a remote resource. Sep is the CSV separator which can only be one character long. There is currently no possibility to provide a line separator (Default: \r\n or \n; \r does not work.).

The html of the demoCsv short code displays:

<table border="1">
  {{ $url := .Get "url" }}
  {{ $sep := .Get "sep" }}
  {{ range $i, $r := getCSV $sep $url }}

    {{ if eq $i 0 }}
      <thead>
        <tr>
          {{ range $r }}
            <th>{{ . }}</th>
          {{end}}
        </tr>
      </thead>
    {{else}}
      <tbody>
        <tr>
          {{ range  $r }}
            <td>{{ . }}</td>
          {{end}}
        </tr>
      </tbody>
    {{end}}

  {{ end }}
</table>

The final result:

Integrating into layout HTML files

An example on how I have integrated my GitHub Gists into the left sidebar can be found here: layouts/partials/sidebarLeftCategories.html#L29

Notes

Downloaded remote files will be cached in --cacheDir. The default cacheDir is set to $TMPDIR/hugo_cache/ The only cache invalidation method is left to the user: rm *. Downloaded files are always cached.

Update 8. Feb. 2015:

The parameter --ignoreCache has been added to ignore the read from the cache but writing to the cache is still happening.

getJSON and getCSV are now variadic functions. You can submit multiple parts of an URL which will be joined to the final URL. Example:

{{ $id := .Params._id }}
{{ $url_pre :=  "http://localhost:3000/db/persons/" }}
{{ $url_post := "/limit/10/skip/0" }}
{{ $gistJ := getJSON $url_pre $id $url_post }}

For getCSV the separator argument has been moved to the beginning of the function.

Futures Features

Once I have more time I would like to implement also an RSS reader and advanced authentication methods.

A far future feature would be to generated a whole category or category tree with n documents from a JSON file. That feature would allow to import categories and products from Magento or any other system.

Update 29. Jan. 2016:

Renamed the topic to Data-driven content because better wording :-)