Nera GitHub

Core concepts

The four-stage pipeline

Every build runs the same fixed pipeline: load app data → render pages → apply plugins → write output. Understanding these four stages explains almost everything about how Nera behaves.

app vs meta

Two data objects reach your templates:

  • app — global values from config/app.yaml, available on every page.
  • meta — per-page values: your frontmatter, plus derived keys like meta.href, meta.dirname, meta.filename and meta.createdAt.

Plugins add to both — for example, plugin-navigation sets app.nav, and plugin-tags sets meta.tagLinks.

Layouts

Layouts are Pug files under theme/views/. A page's layout frontmatter picks one:

markdown 
---
layout: pages/docs.pug
title: My page
---

The path is relative to theme/views/, so pages/docs.pug is theme/views/pages/docs.pug.

If config/app.yaml sets theme: (a package such as @nera-static/theme-example, or a local folder), the layouts come from that theme, and a file in your own theme/views/ or theme/assets/ replaces the theme's file at the same path — override one template without copying the rest. npx @nera-static/nera new my-site --theme example starts a site that way.

Translations

config/app.yaml holds a translations map. In a layout, t('key') resolves app.translations[meta.lang || app.lang][key], falling back to the key itself — so missing translations are visible, not silent.