Why settle for mundane lorem ipsum when a better, less euclidean option exists? Lorem Lovecraft uses Gulp to convert plaintext books into easily-consumable json and uses it to power a static AngularJS single page app. The app itself can either grab a selection from a book or use a sample of a book to generate random ipsum text. You can see it in action at lorem-lovecraft.com.
Enjoy snippets of old books but fear the consequences of repeated exposure to horrors from beyond space and time? No problem! Lorem Lovecraft is designed to be easy to fork and repurpose to make your own ipsum generator.
- Install Node and Npm
- Install Gulp :
npm install -g gulp - Install Dependencies :
npm install && bower install - Done! Run
gulp serveto view the app. On most systems a browser window will open automatically, if not go to http://localhost:3000.
gulp serve: Start a local development server.gulp build: Generate an optimized build for deploymentgulp serve:dist: Build and serve the generated build.gulp books:parse: Parse books into json
Lorem Lovecraft comes with built-in support for Firebase Hosting. There's a free tier, it's painless, you'll be up and running in no time. Firebase quickstart. Once you've set up an account and a project, just follow these instructions.
# Install the Firebase CLI
npm install -g firebase-tools
# Auth with Firebase
firebase login
# Deploy!
firebase deployYou may want a second environment to test changes before you deploy to production. Create a second project in firebase and run the following commands.
# Auth into firebase as above if you haven't already.
# Add a reference to your test environment and switch to using that environment.
firebase use --add
# Deploy as normal, now using the test environment
firebase deploy
# Switch between firebase environments locally
firebase use my-firebase-project-name
gulp build generates an easily deployable bundle in the /dist folder. Copy the contents into the webroot of the server of your choice, configure your server to rewrite requests to /index.html and you'll be up and running.
More thorough instructions to come in a future version.
Adding CircleCI support is easy. Once you've forked the repo, set up a CircleCI account with your github account. Set up a project using the repo and two workflows will automatically populate in Circle.
deploy_release: Watches for new tags on master and deploys to production.deploy_develop: Watches for commits on develop and deploys to test.
In order for Circle to deploy to Firebase you're going to need a CI-friendly deploy token.
firebase use my-firebase-project-name
firebase login:ci
# Follow the instructions and save the generated token for later.Note that you'll need to do this for each environemnt, switching between them by using firebase use new-firebase-environment-name.
To bring together CircleCI and Firebase we're going to need to add some environment variables. For security reasons you should never store sensitive information like deploy tokens in your repo. You also shouldn't store environment-specific configuration information like your google analytics id. Environment variables solve for both of these issues. You can set these variables in the environment variables section of your project's settings. Add the following environment variables and Circle will use them as arguments in the gulp build to generate an environment-specific build.
FIREBASE_PROJECT_PROD: The firebase project name for production environment.FIREBASE_DEPLOY_TOKEN_PROD: The firebase deploy token for production environment.ANALYTICS_ID_PROD: Google analytics Id for production environment.
FIREBASE_PROJECT_TEST: The firebase project name for test environment.FIREBASE_DEPLOY_TOKEN_TEST: The firebase deploy token for production environment.ANALYTICS_ID_TEST: Google analytics Id for test environment.
Lorem Lovecraft is designed to be a repurposable seed project for creating lorem ipsum generators. With a bit of modification any plaintext (.txt) document can be added to the site.
Keep in mind that copyright is an issue when selecting texts to use, so finding works that are public domain is your best bet. Project Gutenberg and WikiSource are both great sources for public domain content with support for downloading plaintext. Works that use a Creative Commons license are a good option too, but these tend to be harder to find.
Once you've found some content add the .txt file to the /book_source directory to get started.
The text needs to be fairly uniform for gulp books:parse to parse it into json. Most books are a fairly uniform collection of paragraphs and section headings that form the body of the book, bookened by non-uniform sections at the start and end with titles, tables of contents, footnotes, etc. Step one is removing these start and end sections. Don't worry about chapter headings, the parser will deal with them.
Some of the information you just removed was useful, things like the book's title. We can preserve this information using frontmatter, a block of yaml at the start of the content. Frontmatter is an idea that comes from the Jekyll static site generator, in case you were wondering.
---
title: 'The Call of Cthulhu'
key: 'call-of-cthulhu'
------
title: 'Title of the book. (required)'
key: 'Internal unqiue name for the book. Kebab case (written-like-this) is standard. (optional)'
---Once your .txt file is in place in the /book_source directory the build process can handle the rest. Running gulp books:parse will parse the .txt file into json and place the resulting file in the /book_json. Running this job and checking the json is a good first step, or you can just run gulp serve and see the json in action.
MIT