Askja is a minimalist blogging platform written in Rails as a more flexible
alternative to static generators. Possibly it's most distinguishing feature is
that it requires articles to be defined in *.yml/*.md files, which can be
subsequently be loaded to the database to be served.
Askja is current themed by default for http://mutelight.org, the blog that it was originally designed for, but this is the only way in which it's coupled to a specific blog. Hopefully a generic theme will eventually be built.
Some major features:
- Top article retrieval using Google analytics
- Full-page caching for extremely fast page loads
Use bundler to prepare the application's Gem dependencies in its directory:
bundle install
Open one of config/app/development.rb or config/app/production.rb and modify values as appropriate.
Deploy a new secret token with:
bundle exec rake secret_deploy
After configuring a production database, load the database schema with:
bundle exec rake db:schema:load RAILS_ENV=production
Content is stored in the content/ subdirectory in Markdown/YAML format. If
you store your content in another Git repository, clone it out using something
like:
git clone https://github.com/brandur/mutelight.git content
Run the init task whether or not custom content was checked out. This task
will generate the content/ directory if it doesn't already exist.
bundle exec rake init
Load content to the database using:
bundle exec rake update RAILS_ENV=production
Optionally, rank articles according to their views using:
bundle exec rake update:top RAILS_ENV=production
In production, assets should be precompiled:
bundle exec rake assets:precompile
Askja should now be ready to go. Deploy it on Phusion Passenger or your favorite Rails server.
rake:init creates a symlink from public/images/articles/ back to the
content/images directory. Nginx with Phusion Passenger for example, doesn't
follow this symlink properly. A bind works instead (requires root access):
sudo mount --bind $(pwd)/content/images $(pwd)/public/images/articles
This can be placed in /etc/fstab like so:
<src> <dest> none defaults,bind 0 0