Desant /dɛsɑːnt/ is a Polish word for military landing operations aimed at a bringing the landing force usually via landing craft to a shore or to land with the purpose of power projection ashore by forces coming usually from ships and also aircraft and able to fight.

Desant - Open source landing pages!

Desant is an open source, neat landing page application. It's simple to use, customize and extend to your needs. There's an awesome admin area too - it will give you all the information and statistics you need.

Demo

You can check online demo of the admin on here. Login as admin with password pass.

Quick start with Vagrant

There's a public Vagrant box configured to run with Desant. You can hop into the project qucikly by running:

$ gem install vagrant # if not installed yet
$ vagrant up
$ vagrant ssh
vagrant@vagrant:~$ cd desantapp

Now just go and perform installation and setup steps described below.

Installation and setup

First of all, install all the dependencies using Bundler:

$ bundle

Desant uses MySQL as backend, so you should have this database installed and running. If you have it then copy .env.sample to .env - this file contains i.a. database configuration and admin setup:

$ cp .env.sample .env

Admin area uses very simple, single user authentication. Now generate password hash for your password:

$ rake password_hash PASS=yoursecretpass
Your password hash: $2a$10$9r64bxHKi3wxFwKDbjZYWOj4M26xp0RM0maoGeRo0JPy6Cg5OrzBC

Copy generated hash and assign it to ADMIN_PASSWORD_HASH in .env file, edit database configuration and other settings.

Last thing to do is to run create databases and run migrations:

$ foreman run rake db:create
$ foreman run rake db:migrate

As you can se, we must use foreman run command from now on - it's because all the stuff which is affected by the database requires its configuration to be loaded. Foreman automatically loads configuration from the .env file.

Now you should be able to start the application, we must use Foreman here as well.

$ foreman start

If everything went fine, you should go to http://localhost:5000/ and see a demo landing page! Use http://localhost:5000/admin/ to access admin area.

To run RSpec unit tests use the following rake task:

$ foreman run rake spec

Frontend tests (JavaScript unit tests) runs with:

$ foreman run rake spec:jasmine

You can also run all the specs together:

$ foreman run rake spec:all

For development purposes you can populate dummy data using following rake task:

$ foreman run rake db:populate

Design introduction

Desant is not a Rails app, it's an experiment with full stack, single page application in Backbone.js managed by Sinatra backend. Here's the directory structure explained:

apps/                   applications (components actually).

apps/*/assets/          asset pipeline files.
apps/*/assets/static/   static files.
apps/*/assets/app/      backbone application files.
apps/*/assets/libs/     javascript libraries.
apps/*/assets/styles/   stylesheet files.

apps/*/forms/           form classes.
apps/*/helpers/         application specified helpers. 
apps/*/loggers/         custom notification subscribers.
apps/*/models/          model classes.
apps/*/presenters/      application presenters.
apps/*/services/        application service classes.
apps/*/spec/            application specified test files.  
apps/*/views/           application view files.

config/                 configuration files.
db/migrate/             database migrations.
lib/                    libraries and extensions, also app's core files.
log/                    log files.
spec/                   global test files.

Project is booted with boot.rb configuration file. All the apps (components) are routed in config.ru, with standard Rack::Router.

The main goal of the experiment was to provide system for easy and robust work on Backbone.js application and reusable backend elements. It's also aims to get rid of stupid Rails' assumptions that action = page, and models are used both in forms and presentations. In Desant, models are separated from forms and presenters. Model takes care about business logic, when forms handle input and presenters output. More sophisticated operations are handled with services. This design makes the stuff easy to test and reuse across the projects.

Coding conventions

TODO...

Screenshots

Copyright

Copyright (C) 2012 by Chris Kowalik a.k.a nu7hatch chris@nu7hat.ch

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.