General concepts

The way Lume works is very simple: it just read files in your src directory, process the content and save the final files into the dest folder.

The file extension of the files determine if they are loaded and how to process them. By default only the following extensions are enabled:

• Page formats: All files with the following extensions will be loaded to generate HTML pages: .md, .njk, .tmpl.json, .tmpl.js, .tmpl.ts, .yaml

• Data formats: The following files will be loaded to get data that will be used by other pages or layouts: _data.yaml, _data.ts, _data.js, _data.json

This means that files with a different extension will be ignored by Lume. If you want to use other extensions (like .css or .jpg), you must enable them. To do that, there are different choices:

• If you only want to copy files or folders as they are without any change, the best way is using site.copy(). More info about copy static files.
• If you want to process the content, they must loaded (more info about loaders). There are three types of loaders, depending on the purpose of the format:
  • To load files that generate HTML pages, use site.loadPages().
  • To load assets files (like .css or .js), use site.loadAssets().
  • To load files with shared data, use site.loadData().
• In most cases, there's a plugin for that, so see the Plugins section for more info.

Plugins

Everything in Lume is a plugin. Even the support of core formats like .md, .yaml, .json etc is provided by the following plugins that are enabled by default:

• Markdown
• JSON
• Modules
• Nunjucks
• YAML

There are a couple of additional plugins, enabled by default to provide common features:

• Url
• Search
• Pagination