Building Prayer Hub

This is an Eleventy (11ty) static site. Nothing runs at request time — every page, the sitemap, and the RSS feeds are generated at build time and served as plain files. To add content, add a file and rebuild.

Adding a prayer

Every prayer is one markdown file in content/prayers/. Filename doesn't matter for routing — the permalink in the frontmatter decides the URL.

Create content/prayers/my-new-prayer.md:

---
layout: layouts/prayer.njk
permalink: "///"
title: "My New Prayer"
slug: my-new-prayer
category: night-prayer
keyword: "the target search keyword this page is for"
excerpt: "One sentence describing the prayer — this becomes the meta description."
dateAdded: 2026-08-06
dateModified: 2026-08-06
---

The prayer text goes here, as plain paragraphs.

Amen.

Required fields:

Bump dateModified on every edit, even small wording fixes — that's the freshness signal the sitemap and feeds are built around.

Adding a category

Categories live in _data/categories.json. Each one auto-generates a hub page at /{slug}/ listing every prayer whose category field matches, and a link in the site nav. To add one:

{
  "slug": "saints-prayer",
  "title": "Prayers to the Saints",
  "rubric": "Ad Sanctos",
  "icon": "church",
  "description": "One paragraph describing the category, used as its page meta description."
}

icon is a Material Symbols Outlined ligature name (e.g. wb_sunny, bedtime, shield, church). rubric is the short Latin subtitle shown under the category name on the homepage.

No template changes needed — the hub page, nav link, and homepage card are all generated automatically for anything in this file.

Social images

scripts/prayer-image.js renders any prayer as a share-ready PNG in the same illuminated-missal design the prayer pages use — cream ground, double gold frame, fleuron divider, uppercase title, drop cap, rubric and domain in the footer.

npm run social -- night-prayer                    # 1600×900, for X
npm run social -- night-prayer --size=portrait    # 1080×1350, for Instagram
npm run social -- --all --size=square             # every prayer, 1080×1080

Output lands in social/ (gitignored). The argument is a prayer slug, or a path to any markdown file with the standard frontmatter — so you can render a draft before it's committed.

Paths

Both the input and the output are fully customizable:

# write anywhere — the folder is created if it doesn't exist
npm run social -- night-prayer --out="C:/Users/you/Desktop/posts"

# render a draft sitting outside the repo
npm run social -- "C:/drafts/prayer-for-healing.md" --out="C:/drafts/img"

# point --all (and slug lookup) at a different source folder
npm run social -- --all --prayers="C:/drafts" --out="C:/drafts/img"

• Input — an absolute path, a path relative to where you ran the command, a path relative to the repo root, or a bare slug resolved inside the prayers folder. First match wins, in that order.
• --out — absolute, or relative to where you ran the command. Nested paths are created recursively. Defaults to social/ in the repo.
• --prayers — the folder --all scans and bare slugs resolve against. Defaults to content/prayers/.

Paths with spaces need quoting. Windows backslashes work as-is.

The body font auto-shrinks to fit on one image. A prayer too long even at the smallest size is split across numbered slides (-1.png, -2.png) with a CONTINUED mark and an n / total counter — ready to post as a carousel.

Flags: --out=dir, --prayers=dir, --pad=N, --font-scale=N, --keep-svg, --svg-only, --no-excerpt, --no-drop-cap, --max-slides=N, --fonts=dir.

Layout

The proportions are tuned for phone viewing — these get read on a five-inch screen in a scrolling feed, so the margins are tight and the body text sets larger than a print layout would. Everything scales off the image's short edge, so it holds at every preset size. The knobs live in the LAYOUT object at the top of the script:

For a one-off tweak without touching the file, use --pad=0.03 (tighter) or --font-scale=1.15 (bigger text). Note that shrinking is what keeps a prayer on a single image — pushing --font-scale too high forces a split.

Text is laid out with a serif advance-width table rather than real font metrics, so line breaks are approximate — check the output before posting a title with unusual characters. PNG rasterization uses @resvg/resvg-js; if it isn't installed the script writes SVG instead. Rendering uses whatever serif the system provides (Georgia locally). To match the site's EB Garamond and Source Serif 4 exactly, drop the .ttf files in a folder and pass --fonts=that-folder.

What's NOT built yet

These content shapes don't have templates yet — they'd need their own layout, not just a new category:

• Novenas — day-by-day sequences, need a different structure than a single prayer
• Litanies — call-and-response format (see the Angelus mockup in the Stitch export for the intended V/. R/. styling)
• Liturgical calendar / saint-of-the-day — needs date-driven logic, not a flat file per entry

Everything else — a prayer, to any saint, for any occasion, in any of the existing categories — is buildable right now with just a markdown file.

Local build

npm install       # first time only
npm run build      # outputs static site to _site/
npm run serve       # build + serve locally with live reload

Deploying

Push to main. Coolify watches the repo and rebuilds the Docker image (Dockerfile → static build → Caddy serving _site/ on port 80) automatically. There's no manual deploy step beyond git push.

SITE_URL (set in Coolify's environment variables, currently https://prayerhub.space) controls every canonical URL, the sitemap, and the RSS feeds — don't hardcode the domain anywhere in content.