CowboyD

What is it all about?

CowboyD is a try to skip that part of web-app development where you embedding Cowboy. Normally you would like to create an application, write there some code like

start(_Type, _Args) ->
	Routes = [
		{'_', [
			{"/", handler_index, []},
			{'_', handler_notfound, []}
		]}
	],
	Nba = 100,
	Port = 8008,
	{ok, _Pid} = cowboy:start_http(http_listener, Nba, [{port, Port}], [
		{env, [{dispatch, Routes}]}
	]),
	ok.

Also you should include the Cowboy as a dependency and start it. And don't forget about some code reloading tool - probably you'll also need it. Not so hard but this is routine actions and CowboyD suggests you to get rid of them and focus on writing your application. You just write your application, create routes config file and some Cowboy handlers. When finished you just run CowboyD:

cowboyd start appname /path/to/appname 8008 100

and enjoy the results at localhost:8008

You can update your code and it'll be reloaded on the fly. routes updating is a little bit more complicated - no magic here yet and you should manually run

cowboyd routes-update appname

Of cause you can run multiple instances of CowboyD - multiple instances of Erlang VM will be launched (probably this part will be changed and there will be pool of running apps inside one VM).

Installation

# cd somewhere you'd like to download the project to
cd ~/github_projects
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/chvanikoff/cowboyd
# Give execution rights to cowboyd if there is no
chmod +x cowboyd/cowboyd
# Link Cowboyd to somew executable directory in your $PATH, for example /usr/bin
sudo ln -s cowboyd/cowboyd /usr/bin/cowboyd

Usage:

After you've created webapp (example) you can start/stop CowboyD and update routes for currently running applications:

# start application
cowboyd start <appname> <path> <port> [<nba>]
# stop application
cowboyd stop <appname>
# update application routes
cowboyd routes-update <appname>
# start Erlang shell for the application
cowboyd shell <appname>

appname: string, is the name of your application

path: string, is a path to the root of your application

port: integer, port Cowboy will listen to

nba: integer, optional (default is 10) number of non-blocking acceptors for Cowboy