Batch export Org-mode pages

A common task if - like me - you use Org-mode to create static websites; is to export the document to your destination format. Take this blog for instance. It’s written in Org-mode, which is exported to markdown for use by Hugo which will then compile it to HTML. The obvious choice for exporting your content would be to call the command directly within Emacs, but say you wanted to do this as a part of some other build process or as part of an automated continuous deployment process it would be necessary to invoke the export command from the shell.

Fortunately, Emacs provides the ability to use it in a non-interactive manner via the --batch flag.

--batch                     do not do interactive display; implies -q
--no-init-file, -q          load neither ~/.emacs nor default.el

Running Emacs in batch mode we just need to open our Org-mode document, either programmatically or with the --visit FILE flag, load whatever Org-mode exporter library, and call its export function. I’m using ox-Hugo so that’s what’ll I’ll require. It’s also necessary to ensure the Emacs can load this library; the easiest way I know how to do this is to call (package-initialize), which loads all packages so I don’t need to adjust load paths or load individual packages.

The solution to my particular situation where I’m exporting the entire document to markdown intended for Hugo as part of a build process on my machine looks like this:

#!/bin/sh

index=./content-org/index.org

progn="(progn
  (package-initialize)
  (require 'ox-hugo)
  (org-hugo-export-wim-to-md :all-subtrees nil nil))"

emacs --batch --visit "$index" --eval "$progn" --kill

The --eval flag is used to run by export commands, but you could have just as easily put these command in their own dot el file and load that - or put each sexp as it’s own argument to --eval.

Note that this isn’t tested for a continuous deployment environment and you’d likely have to adjust a few things to ensure that packages are available and whatnot.

Only three posts in and I’ve already managed to make a meta post about how this blog is created.