NAME

Statocles::Help::Setup - A guide to setting up a new Statocles site

VERSION

version 0.013

DESCRIPTION

This document describes how to set up a simple blog web site suitable to be deployed to GitHub Pages using Statocles.

site.yml - The Main Configuration File

Statocles uses Beam::Wire, a dependency-injection module, to define its configuration. The format is YAML and contains the data needed to build the objects: Arguments to the object's constructor. This means that any ATTRIBUTES defined in the documentation can be used in the configuration file.

The configuration file is, by default, called site.yml. See the statocles command documentation if you want to have multiple site configuration files.

A Theme

First, we'll start by defining a theme. A theme (Statocles::Theme) builds and parses templates into Statocles::Template objects. We'll use the Statocles default theme, included with the module.

    theme:
        class: Statocles::Theme
        args:
            source_dir: '::default'

One of the most useful things about using a dependency injection module is that you can easily plug-in your own classes. If you want to use your own template format, you can build your own Statocles::Theme class that provides a different kind of Statocles::Template object and use that instead.

A Source

Statocles takes simple, YAML-and-Markdown-formatted document files and builds HTML pages out of them.

So we need a place to put our source documents. A store fills multiple roles relating to reading and writing files. Right now, we need it to hold on to our blog posts. We'll put our blog posts in the blog directory.

    blog_store:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: blog

The blog application will use this store to add new blog posts and build web pages from the documents in the blog directory. More on that later.

Though stores are usually just directories, they could also be a database, getting the blog post documents from a document database.

An App

A Statocles app is the driver that turns documents into pages. To build pages, we need a theme and a store full of documents.

Since we're building a blog site, we'll use the Statocles blog app:

    blog_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Blog
        args:
            url_root: /blog
            theme:
                $ref: theme
            source:
                $ref: blog_store

We put our blog app under the root URL /blog. All pages that come from this app will start with /blog (except the index page, we'll move that to /index.html). We used our already-defined theme and blog_store objects to fill in the required theme and source application attributes ($ref is a Beam::Wire special instruction that says "look up this object from the config file").

A Destination

Before we can generate pages, we need a place to put them. Statocles needs two places, a build directory (a staging area), and a deploy directory (the final destination for the site).

    build:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: build

    deploy:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: .

For our site, we've got a build directory for our staging area, where we can verify that our site looks correct before we deploy. Our deploy will happen in the root directory of our site. This is good for a GitHub Pages site.

Though stores are usually just directories, they could also perform an SFTP or FTP or transfer the pages to a CDN (I think I have some evolution to do here).

A Site

Now that we're ready, we can tie it all together. A site is a collection of apps that build and deploy to the same place. The special git site knows how to deploy to git repositories.

    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            apps:
                blog:
                    $ref: blog_app
            build_store:
                $ref: build
            deploy_store:
                $ref: deploy
            deploy_branch: master
            title: My Site
            index: blog
            nav:
                main:
                    - title: Blog
                      href: /index.html

When adding apps to our site, we give them a name (in this case blog) so that we can refer to them on the command-line (later). We add our build_store and deploy_store. The git branch we want to deploy to is master. As part of the default template, we can provide a site title.

The index attribute gives the name of the app to use as our index page. Since we only have one app, we can only give it the blog. Whatever main page the blog app defines will be moved to the main site index /index.html.

Finally, we can define a nav list, again giving a name: main. The default template uses the main nav across the top.

The Complete site.yml

Combine it all together and you get this. Feel free to copy and paste to start your own site.

    theme:
        class: Statocles::Theme
        args:
            source_dir: '::default'
    blog_store:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: blog
    blog_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Blog
        args:
            url_root: /blog
            theme:
                $ref: theme
            source:
                $ref: blog_store
    build:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: build
    deploy:
        class: Statocles::Store
        args:
            path: .
    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            apps:
                blog:
                    $ref: blog_app
            build_store:
                $ref: build
            deploy_store:
                $ref: deploy

            title: My Site
            index: blog
            nav:
                main:
                    - title: Blog
                      href: /index.html

The statocles Command

Now that we have a site.yml, we can run the statocles command to manage our site.

Initialize Your Git Repo

    $ git init
    $ git remote add origin ssh://git@github.com/preaction/preaction.github.io

Before we can get going, we need to create our git repository.

NOTE: In the future I plan to include this as a statocles create command.

Create A Blog Post

Remember when we gave our blog app a name? Now we can use that name to access the blog's command-line commands. To create a new blog post, we can use the post command:

    $ statocles blog post My First Post
    New post at: blog/2014/06/04/my-first-post.yml

Everything after post will be used as the title of the post.

If you have the EDITOR environment variable set, your editor will automatically open on the newly-created document.

Build The Site

    $ statocles build

Running the build command will write all our pages to the build store, which points to the build directory. We can open up this directory and look at the files to make sure that our deploy will be correct.

NOTE: In the future, you'll be able to run a local web server to navigate your site, but that's not yet available.

Commit Your Changes

    $ git add blog/2014/06/04/my-first-post.yml
    $ git commit -m'My first post'

Once the build looks good, we'll want to commit our changes. The major feature of having a website in a git repository is change tracking.

Deploy The Site

    $ statocles deploy

Running the deploy command will, in the case of the git site, commit the updated pages to the git repository. deploy will try to do a git push automatically, so your changes are now live on Github Pages!

AUTHOR

Doug Bell <preaction@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2014 by Doug Bell.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.

cpanm Statocles

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Statocles