site-manager

A simple server for developing single-page applications quickly in a team environment.

The core of the server are handlebar templates. Here is one handlebar template that comes with the site-manager at public/index.html.

A Very Simple Example

Create a new directory demo appliation in a new directory, such as...

mkdir mydemoapp
cd mydemoapp

Create a new package.json, declaring site-manager as a dependency.

{
  "name": "mydemoapp",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "dependencies": {
    "site-manager": "*"
  },
  "main":"index",
  "engines":{
    "node":">= 0.6.0 < 0.7.0"
  }
}

Declaring the site-manager isn't strictly required, but makes deploying to many systems (such as Heroku) much easier. Instead of declaring the dependency, one can also install the site-manager globally using npm install -g site-manager.

Next, we need a index.js file:

(function (__dirname, module) {
    "use strict";
    var path = require("path");
    module.exports = function (defaults, cb, properties, app) {
        defaults.useRequireJS = false; // disable the site-manager support for requireJS
        defaults.hostname = "mydemoapp.jolira.com"; // define the name of the site
        defaults.title = "My Demo App"; // The title to be displayed in the titlebar
        defaults.htmlFiles = [
            path.join(__dirname, "content.html") // add some content
        ];
        return cb(undefined, defaults);
    };
})(__dirname, module);

Now, all that is remaining is to specify the HTML-fragment to be displayed when we run the site-manager.

<h1>Hello World!!!</h1>

To install the dependencies:

npm install -d

To run the example:

$ node_modules/.bin/site-manager --debug --port=3000 .

To run the example on Heroku you need the following ``Procfile`:

web: node_modules/.bin/site-manager --debug --port=$PORT --watch-dirs=false .

Go to http://localhost:3000 to get the example running.

Configuring a Site

As shown in the example, every site-manager site has configures the site by exporting a function. This function looks like this:

    "use strict";
    module.exports = function (defaults, cb, properties, app) {
        // configure the defaults object here
        return cb(undefined, defaults);
    };

The default object takes the following parameters:

• defaults: The defaults object to be configured. A detailed description of the properties of this object can be found at lib/defaults.json. The public/index.html shows how may of these values are used.
• cb the the callback function, which takes two parameters cb(err, vals). The first parameter should be set to undefinedunless there is an error to report. The second parameter should be used to pass the configured default object back to the site-manager.
• properties loaded from a .config.json file in the project directory.
• app the express.js object used by the site-manager.

Other Features

Key features of this package are:

• Teams: Break the the app into many HTML fragments to make team development easier.
• HTML5Boilerplate: Our default templates incorporate the latest & greatest boilerplate.
• RequireJS: Teams can (optionally) use Asynchronous Module Definition to organize their JavaScript.
• Auto Reloads: The site-manager watches the filesystem for changes, automatically reloading a site when it detects a change.
• Less: Automatically compiles .less files to text/css using.
• Properties: The site-manager loads .config.json files from the site directory. The site-manager also loads properties from a ~/.sitemanager.json file, and passes the data to the different sites it serves.
• Manifest: The site-manager automatically updates HTML5 manifest when changes are detected that require reloading the site.
• Developer Support: The server monitors files and automatically restarts when changes are detected.

Multi-Site Mode

The site-manager can run in multi-site mode, which creates virtual hosts for each module. The hostname is defined in the site is used as the server name of the vhost.

In order to run in multi-site mode, point the site-manager to a directory that contains mutiple sites, such as in

site-manager examples # use the examples directory from the repo

To test sites you have to define the correct hostname. In order to do so, you have to add these names to /etc/hosts. To define the hostames used by examples from the site-manager github repo, add the following line to /etc/hosts (assuming you are running the site-manager on your machine):

127.0.0.1  simple.jolira.com advanced.jolira.com

Once this entry has been added, you can access the advanced example as http://advanced.jolira.com:3000 and the simple example at http://simple.jolira.com:3000.

Single-Site Mode

When running in single-site mode, there is no vhosting (as only one site is served). To run the site-manager in single-site mode, point it to a site directory as in:

site-manager examples/simple # use the examples directory from the repo

As there is no virtual hosting, we do not have to define any entry in /etc/hosts and can access the example at http://localhost:3000.

Enable Debug Output

Debug output is generated when the string site-manager is part of the value of the NODE_DEBUG environment variable.

export NODE_DEBUG=site-manager

Testing

Install jake: npm install -g jake

Note that Jake is a system-level tool, so it wants to be installed globally.

To execute tests execute: jake test

License

MIT License