chive

Chive

A mountable blog engine for Rails.

Quick Start

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

```bash
gem 'chive'
```

Run the rake task for a complete installation:

```bash
$ rake chive:complete
```

The complete installation includes Devise for user authentication. Alternatively, you can run rake chive:install to get the minimum requirements without Devise.

Next, run the database migrations:

```bash
$ rake db:migrate
```

If you installed with rake:complete, you can seed the database with an example user and article:

```bash
$ rake db:seed
```

Start the server:

```bash
$ rails s
```

Browse to http://localhost:3000/chive. You should see the article index page.

If you installed with rake:complete, go to http://localhost:3000/users/sign_in and log in with email [e-mail] and password password.

If you don't have user authentication configured, you'll still be able to test the admin features in development mode. For security purposes, you're required to supply an authentication implementation for the admin pages to work in production.

Custom Setup

If you want to customize Chive or to integrate it into an existing app, you can follow these steps to get it working.

Add the gem dependencies to the Gemfile

Install the minimum dependencies:

$ rails g chive:dependencies
$ bundle install

Install and configure CKEditor

The default:

$ rails g chive:ckeditor
$ rake active_storage:install

The default CKEditor configuration uses ActiveRecord and ActiveStorage to store images and attachments. You can select different options by running rails g ckeditor:install instead. See the CKEditor gem for more information.

To use Chive's default authorization for uploading files through CKEditor, add this line to config/initializers/ckeditor.rb:

config.authorize_with :chive

Generate the initializer

rails g chive:initializer

Install the migrations

rake chive:install:migrations
rake acts_as_taggable_on_engine:install:migrations

Users

Chive requires a users table for authors. The default installation uses Devise. To install Devise with Chive's defaults:

rails g chive:devise

If you want to use an existing Devise setup or an alternative user system, update config/initializers/chive.rb to point to your user model. Note that Chive requires the user model to include a name attribute.

Authentication

If you're using Devise you can get quick and easy authentication with the use_devise option in config/initializers/chive.rb:

config.use_devise = true

To customize authentication, you'll need to modify the controllers. Add them to your app/controllers directory:

rails g chive:controllers

Mounting the engines

The default routes in config/routes.rb:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount Ckeditor::Engine => '/ckeditor'
  mount Chive::Engine => "/chive"

  # ...etc.
end

You can make the blog your home page by changing the Chive::Engine path to /:

Rails.application.routes.draw do

  # [...etc.]

  # If you mount Chive on the home page, make sure it's the last route you
  # define. Otherwise `Chive::Engine#index` will process all your website's
  # paths before the other routes have a chance to evaluate them.
  mount Chive::Engine => '/'
end

Customizing the Layout

There are a few different options for modifying the look and feel of Chive pages.

The config.public_layout setting in config/initializers/chive.rb lets you change the layout used by public pages (i.e., Chive::Articles#index and Chive::Articles#show). This is useful for applying your own style to the main site while still using the standard admin pages for content management.

To modify the views, add them to your app/views directory:

rails generate chive:views

Creating Your Own Resource

Another option for customizing your blog is to create a custom resource.

Make your own controller, e.g., apps/controller/blog_controller.rb:

class BlogController < Chive::ArticlesController
  layout 'application'
end

The layout call makes your controller use your app/views/layout/application layout instead of the engine's.

Add a new path to config/routes.rb:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  # ...
  resources :blog, path: '/blog', controller: 'blog', only: [:index, :show]
  # ...
end

The only: [:index, :show] option limits the resource to the public pages.

Now you can make your own views at app/views/blog/index.html.erb and app/views/blog/show.html.erb.

Third-Party Libraries

Chive uses the following libraries and plugins:

• acts-as-taggable-on
• bootstrap
• ckeditor
• flatpickr
• jquery-rails
• will_paginate

Sites Using Chive

• gamefic.com
• moviecrank.com