Shinmun - a git-based blog engine
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.
Features
Quickstart
Install the gems:
$ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
$ gem install rack BlueCloth rubypants coderay georgi-git_store georgi-kontrol georgi-shinmun
Create a sample blog:
$ 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!
Writing Posts
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
and open it with $EDITOR.
Post Format
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][13] and [Github Pages][14].
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.
Syntax highlighting
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:
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!
Directory layout
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
Blog configuation
Inside config.ru
you can set the properties of your blog:
blog.config = {
:language => 'en',
:title => "Blog Title",
:author => "The Author",
:categories => ["Ruby", "Javascript"],
:description => "Blog description"
}
Templates
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:
<html>
<head>
<title><%= @blog.title %></title>
<%= stylesheet_link_tag 'style' %>
</head>
<body>
<%= @content %>
</body>
</html>
The attributes of a post are accessible via the @post variable:
<div class="article">
<h1><%= @post.title %></h1>
<div class="date">
<%= human_date @post.date %>
</div>
<%= @post.body_html %>
...
</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.
Deployment
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
Phusion Passenger
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
:
<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
GitHub Project
Download or fork the package at my github repository