kowa

The static website manager.

WARNING: This is a work in progress, tests are missing, documentation is missing... a lot of stuff is missing, and it has NOT been deployed in production yet.

Build a typical showcase website thanks to a modern admin web app. You website is generated statically everytime you make a change to it.

A static website is easy to deploy, cost effective and really fast.

With kowa, create a website for your organisation with:

• a customizable homepage
• a contact page
• an activities page to clearly explain what your organisation is about
• a posts page: post your latests news, and publish them automatically on social networks (not implemented yet)
• an events page: inform your audience about your ongoing events
• a members page featuring your organisation team
• and as many custom pages as you want

All these features are optionnals: only take what your need.

The server is written in Go and the client is an Ember.js application that you can find at https://github.com/aymerick/kowa-client.

Development setup

Client

Follow instructions at: https://github.com/aymerick/kowa-client

Themes

Fetch all themes:

$ git clone --recursive git@github.com:aymerick/kowa-themes.git

Database

You need a running mongodb server running on standard port.

Conf file

It is tedious to pass flags to kowa commands, so let's create a $HOME/.kowa/config.toml config file, with TomML syntax like that:

upload_dir = "/path/to/kowa-client/upload"
themes_dir = "/path/to/kowa-themes"
serve_output = true

• The upload_dir setting indicates where uploaded files are stored (ie. the /upload directory of kowa-client).
• The themes_dir setting points to the kowa-themes directory that you previously cloned.
• The serve_output setting activates serving of static sites for the server and build commands.

Install

Fetch kowa:

$ go get github.com/aymerick/kowa
$ go get github.com/tools/godep
$ go get github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...

Build kowa:

$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/aymerick/kowa
$ make build

Add an administrator user with two sites:

$ ./kowa add_user mike mike@asso.ninja Michelangelo TMNT pizzaword true
$ ./kowa add_site site1 'My First Site' mike
$ ./kowa add_site site2 'My Second Site' mike

Start server:

$ ./kowa server

The server is now waiting for API requests on port 35830 and serves generated sites on port 48910.

Embedded data

Install go-bindata package:

$ go get -u github.com/jteeuwen/go-bindata/...

When you modify translations files in locales/ or mailers templates in mailers/templates/, you have to regenerate core/bindata.go file with:

$ make gen

Development workflow

When you change server code, you have to rebuild it with make build and restart it.

When you change a SASS file in a theme you don't have to rebuild the server, but you have to rebuild the theme, for example:

$ cd kowa-themes/willy
$ grunt build

Every time you make a change on a site thanks to the client app, the corresponding static site is rebuilt in the background.

You can still trigger a manual rebuild of a static site with this command:

$ ./kowa build site1

If you modify the code that handles images, you can regenerate all derivatives for a given site with this command:

$ ./kowa gen_derivatives site1

Dependencies

To add a dependcy:

$ go get foo/bar

Edit your code to import foo/bar, then:

$ godep save

To update a dependency:

$ go get -u foo/bar
$ godep update foo/bar
$ godep save

Test

To launch tests, go to kowa root directory, then:

$ make test