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Categorizing archives by year with Hakyll

Recently, I decided to categorize my posts under directories named by the year they were created in. For example, this post is placed at: posts/2015/hakyll-years.mkd. I decided to utilize this structure to also group how archives are listed. Inspired from Hakyll’s tag functionality I wrote my own group by years functionality. This post tries to explain that. Also, I don’t see why a similar logic cannot be used to do simple pagination.

First, like tags, we need to build the list of years. buildYears (like buildTags) will do that:

buildYears :: MonadMetadata m => Pattern -> m [(Year, Int)]
buildYears pattern = do
    ids <- getMatches pattern
    return . frequency . (map getYear) $ ids
  where
    frequency xs =  M.toList (M.fromListWith (+) [(x, 1) | x <- xs])

getYear :: Identifier -> Year
getYear = takeBaseName . takeDirectory . toFilePath

This now can be used in the site Rules:

  years <- buildYears "posts/*/*"

With this, you have a list of years available for other rules to use. Now, we build an index of posts by years (similar to tagsRules):

  forM_ years $ \(year, _)->
      create [yearId year] $ do
         route   idRoute
         compile $ do
           -- Only the posts published in 'year'
           posts <- recentFirst =<< loadAll (fromGlob $ "posts/" ++ year ++"/*")
           let postsCtx = mconcat
                          [ listField "posts" postCtx (return posts)
                          , constField "title" ("Posts published in " ++ year)
                          , defaultContext
                          ]
           makeItem ""
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/posts.html" postsCtx
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/default.html" postsCtx
            >>= relativizeUrls
            >>= cleanIndexUrls

yearPath :: Year -> FilePath
yearPath year = "archive/" ++ year ++ "/index.html"

yearId :: Year -> Identifier
yearId = fromFilePath . yearPath

We now have year wise archives which can be accessed through paths like: /archive/2015/. Similar to tags, we need to support browsing through posts by years. renderYears does that:

-- Extra blaze related imports
import           Text.Blaze.Html                 (toHtml, toValue, (!))
import           Text.Blaze.Html.Renderer.String (renderHtml)
import qualified Text.Blaze.Html5                as H
import qualified Text.Blaze.Html5.Attributes     as A


renderYears :: [(Year, Int)] -> Compiler String
renderYears years = do
  years' <- forM (reverse . sort $ years) $ \(year, count) -> do
      route' <- getRoute $ yearId year
      return (year, route', count)
  return . intercalate ", " $ map makeLink years'

  where
    makeLink (year, route', count) =
      (renderHtml (H.a ! A.href (yearUrl year) $ toHtml year)) ++
      " (" ++ show count ++ ")"
    yearUrl = toValue . toUrl . yearPath

Add this to a pages context like this:

  create ["index.html"] $ do
         route   idRoute
         compile $ do
           -- rest of the compiler context
           let indexCtx = mconcat
                          [ -- some context
                          , field "years" (\_ -> renderYears years)
                          , defaultContext
                          ]
           -- rest of the compiler

$years$ will be available in the template which will link to year wise archives with their corresponding per year count.

See this functionality being used by this blog.

Also, you’d notice that years here could easily have been various categories you may want to have in your blog.