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Statocles-0.031
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/ Statocles::Help::Setup

NAME

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

VERSION

version 0.031

DESCRIPTION

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

Building site.yml - The Main Configuration File

Statocles uses Beam::Wire, a dependency-injection module, for 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. The special ::default string will look in the Statocles share/theme directory.

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.

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.

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: '::default'
            store: 'blog'

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, later).

We define our theme with the string ::default, which will get magically coerced into a theme object. We define our store with the string blog, which will get magically coerced into a file store object.

NOTE: 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. If you want to use your own document format, you can make your own Statocles::Store class that reads from a database.

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).

For our site, we will make 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.

Make sure both of these directories exist:

    $ mkdir build

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: 'build'
            deploy_store: '.'
            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).

Just like the blog store, the build_store and deploy_store will magically create a Statocles::Store::File object from the path string.

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.

    blog_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Blog
        args:
            url_root: /blog
            theme: '::default'
            store: 'blog'
    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            apps:
                blog:
                    $ref: blog_app
            build_store: 'build'
            deploy_store: '.'
            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.markdown

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.

Test The Site

    $ statocles daemon
    Listening on http://*:3000

Run the daemon command to start an HTTP server to view your built site. This will automatically build the site, so if you forgot to run build, don't worry.

If you edit any content, running build again will update the site. On Mac OS X, editing any content will automatically rebuild the site.

Commit Your Changes

    $ git add blog/2014/06/04/my-first-post.markdown
    $ 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!

Adding More Apps

In addition to our blog app, we also want to add some plain Markdown content, and some images.

Plain Markdown

For plain markdown, there is the plain app: Statocles::App::Plain. The plain app takes the same YAML-and-Markdown-formatted documents as the blog app and creates HTML pages, without the lists, tags, and feeds the blog generates.

Like the blog, we need a store to find our documents. This time, we'll use the root directory of our repository, .. Also like the blog, we need a theme to allow for layout templates (we'll use the default theme again). Finally, we'll need a URL root. Since we're using the root directory for our documents, we'll use the root URL for our destination /.

    plain_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Plain
        args:
            url_root: '/'
            theme: '::default'
            store: '.'

Now we just need to add this app to our site, but before we do, we'll create an app for our static files.

Static Files

Lastly, we wanted a place to put any file at all. No processing. No templates. Just a simple copy from one store to another. For this one, we'll put everything in the /static directory, and give a URL root to match. Since there is no processing, we don't need a theme here.

    static_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Static
        args:
            url_root: '/static'
            store: 'static'

Add the New Apps

To enable the new apps, we just need to add them to the site's apps.

    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            apps:
                blog:
                    $ref: blog_app
                plain:
                    $ref: plain_app
                static:
                    $ref: static_app

Add Plain Content

Now, we just need some content for our plain app to deploy. The plain app uses the same format as the blog, so we need a YAML header followed by some Markdown content:

Create a file named about.markdown with the following content:

    ---
    title: About
    ---
    # About Me

    This is a personal website!

Then, run statocles build. The about.markdown turns into about.html in our build/ directory.

Now we should probably make a link in our main nav to the new about page:

    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            # ... [redacted]

            nav:
                main:
                    - title: Blog
                      href: /index.html
                    - title: About
                      href: /about.html

Now, if we run statocles build again, we can see the link in our header.

The Complete site.yml - With More Apps

Along with the blog app and our other settings, here is our new, complete site.yml:

    blog_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Blog
        args:
            url_root: /blog
            theme: '::default'
            store: 'blog'

    plain_app:
        class: Statocles::App::Plain
        args:
            url_root: '/'
            theme: '::default'
            store: '.'

    static_app:

    site:
        class: Statocles::Site::Git
        args:
            apps:
                blog:
                    $ref: blog_app
                plain:
                    $ref: plain_app
                static:
                    $ref: static_app

            build_store: 'build'
            deploy_store: '.'

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

If we're satisfied with our new About page, we can deploy our site with statocles deploy.

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.