Shinmun is a small git-based blog engine. Write posts in your favorite editor, git-push it and serve your blog straight from a repository.
- Posts are text files formatted with Markdown, Textile or HTML
- Runs on Rack, Kontrol and GitStore
- Deploy via git-push
- Index, category and archive listings
- RSS feeds
- Flickr and Delicious aggregations
- Syntax highlighting provided by CodeRay
- AJAX comment system with Markdown preview
- Web frontend using WMD Editor
Install the gems:
$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ gem install rack BlueCloth rubypants coderay mojombo-grit georgi-git_store georgi-kontrol georgi-shinmun
Create a sample blog (this step requires the git executable):
$ shinmun init myblog
This will create a directory with all necessary files. Now start the web server:
$ cd myblog
$ rackup
Browse to the following url:
http://localhost:9292
Voilà, your first blog is up and running!
Posts can be created by using the shinmun
command inside your blog
folder:
shinmun post 'The title of the post'
Shinmun will then create a post file in the right place, for example
in posts/2008/9/the-title-of-the-post.md
. After creating you will
probably open the file, set the category and tags and start writing
your new article.
Each blog post is just a text file with a YAML header and a body. The YAML header is surrounded with 2 lines of 3 dashes. This format is compatible with Jekyll and Github Pages.
The YAML header has following attributes:
title
: mandatorydate
: posts need one, pages notcategory
: a post belongs to one categorytags
: a comma separated list of tags
Example post:
---
date: 2008-09-05
category: Ruby
tags: bluecloth, markdown
title: BlueCloth, a Markdown library
---
This is the summary, which is by definition the first paragraph of the
article. The summary shows up in category listings or the index listing.
Thanks to the fantastic highlighting library CodeRay, highlighted
code blocks can be embedded easily in Markdown. For Textile support
you have to require coderay/for_redcloth
. These languages are
supported: C, Diff, Javascript, Scheme, CSS, HTML, XML, Java, JSON,
RHTML, YAML, Delphi
To activate CodeRay for a code block, you have to declare the language in lower case:
@@ruby
def method_missing(id, *args, &block)
puts "#{id} was called with #{args.inspect}"
end
Note that the declaration MUST be followed by a blank line!
assets
: contains images, stylesheets and javascriptscomments
: comments are stored as yaml filesconfig
: configuration of blog, aggregations and assetsposts
: post files sorted by year/month.pages
: contains static pagestemplates
: ERB templates for layout, posts and others
An example tree:
+ config.ru
+ map.rb
+ helpers.rb
+ assets
+ images
+ stylesheets
+ javascripts
+ config
+ aggregations.yml
+ assets.yml
+ blog.yml
+ pages
+ about.md
+ posts
+ 2007
+ 2008
+ 9
+ my-article.md
+ templates
+ category.rhtml
+ category.rxml
+ _comments.rhtml
+ _comment_form.rhtml
+ feed.rxml
+ helpers.rb
+ index.rhtml
+ index.rxml
+ layout.rhtml
+ post.rhtml
+ page.rhtml
Inside config/blog.yml
you set the properties of your blog:
- title: the title of your blog, used inside templates
- subtitle: the subtitle of your blog
- description: used for RSS
- language: used for RSS
- author: used for RSS
- url: used for RSS
- categories: a list of categories
Shinmun serves asset files from your assets directory. Files in the
directories assets/stylesheets
and assets/javascripts
will be
served as one file each under the URLs assets/stylesheets.css
and
assets/javascripts.css
. You have to name them accordingly like
1-reset.css
and 2-typo.css
to define the order.
Layout and templates are rendered by ERB. The layout is defined in
templates/layout.rhtml
. The content will be provided in the variable
@content
. A minimal example:
@@rhtml
<html>
<head>
<title><%= @blog.title %></title>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'style' %>
</head>
<body>
<%= @content %>
</body>
</html>
The attributes of a post are accessible as instance variables in a template:
@@rhtml
<div class="article">
<div class="date">
<%= date @date %>
</div>
<h2><%= @title %></h2>
<%= @body %>
<h3>Comments</h3>
<!-- comment form -->
</div>
Comments are stored as flat files and encoded as YAML objects. Each
post has a corresponding comment file located at comments/<path to post>
. So administration of comments is possible by editing the YAML
file, which can be done on your local machine, as you can just pull
the comments from your live server.
Shinmun can server the blog straight from the git repository. So on your webserver initialize a new git repo like:
$ cd /var/www
$ mkdir myblog
$ cd myblog
$ git init
Now on your local machine, you add a new remote repository and push your blog to your server:
$ cd ~/myblog
$ git remote add live ssh://myserver.com/var/www/myblog
$ git push live
On your production server, you just need the rackup file config.ru
to run the blog:
$ git checkout config.ru
Now you can run just a pure ruby server or something like Phusion Passenger. Anytime you want to publish a post on your blog, you just write, commit and finally push a post by:
$ git commit -a -m 'new post'
$ git push live
Shinmun is compatible with Phusion Passenger. Install Phusion Passenger as described in my blog post.
Assuming that you are on a Debian or Ubuntu system, you can create a
file named /etc/apache2/sites-available/blog
:
@@xml
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName myblog.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/blog/public
</VirtualHost>
Enable the new virtual host:
$ a2ensite myapp
After restarting Apache your blog should run on Apache on your desired domain:
$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
The example blog has a builtin web frontend. Currently it only works on localhost:9292.
The frontend allows you to create, edit, read or delete posts or pages. Editing a post shows up a form with the wmd editor. You have to look yourself for a correct YAML header, otherwise you will get incorrect results.
One nice thing about the frontend is the Commits page, where you can look at a list of recent commits. Clicking on a commit brings you to a single commit overview, where you can inspect changes introduced by this particular commit.
Download or fork the package at my github repository