Data

All .json files stored in ./src/_data will be made available to the Pug rendering engine through the data key.

This means that if you have a file ./src/_data/user.json like this:

{
  "firstName": "Tim",
  "lastName": "Carry"
}

You'll be able to use it in ./src/index.pug like this:

dl
  dt First Name
  dd=data.user.firstName
  dt Last Name
  dd=data.user.lastName

As JavaScript files

You can also use .js files instead of .json files. Using JavaScript is much more powerful than JSON because you can:

• Add some conditional logic to the values
• require dependencies
• Export functions and not only numbers/strings/arrays/objects
• Add comments

For example, if you need to configure an external service with dev/prod capabilities, you could create a ./src/_data/service.js:

const devCredentials = {
  userName: 'dev',
  password: '1234',
};
const prodCredentials = {
  userName: process.env.USER_NAME,
  password: process.env.PASSWORD,
};
const isProd = process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
module.exports = isProd ? prodCredentials : devCredentials;

Exporting a function

You can also export a function instead of an object. In that case, norska will call the function and return its return value. The function will be called with await, so you can make it async if you need to call an external service or read files on disk if you wish.

The method will be called with one argument, config, that provides a few helper methods, in case you need them:

• rootPath(relativePath) will return the full path to a file, relative to the norska root
• fromPath(relativePath) will return the full path to a file, relative to the norska source folder (default is ./src)
• toPath(relativePath) will return the full path to a file, relative to the norska destination folder (default is ./dist)
• themePath(relativePath) will return the full path to a file, relative to the norska current theme folder

Frontmatter and metadata

The ./src/_data/meta.json file (or its .js version) is treated a bit differently. Any value set inside will be used as the default value for the page metadata, unless a key with the same name is defined in the page metadata.

In other words, the title value of ./src/_data/meta.json will be used for the page <title> unless a title is passed in the frontmatter.

Builtin data

Norska also add the url data object to all pages. It contains the following keys:

• url.base is the absolute URL to the website root
• url.here is the relative path, from the website root, to the current page
• url.pathToRoot is the relative path, from the current page, to the website root

Those keys are mostly used internally to generate links, but you might need them as well.