RETIRED

This software is no long used or maintained. It remains here for historical purposes only. For those interested, I moved to using Ansible for infrastructure automation, and various other tools for static site generation (I seem to pick a new tool for every site).

Otto Webber - A different kind of web content management system

Otto Webber is a library of fabric tasks, scripts, and functions that help you manage web sites from the ground up. He will help you with everything from setting up a new web server to publishing your latest blog post.

Warning

This software is not ready for real use. In fact, it hardly does anything at all. I am practicing readme-driven development, which means this document describes how things should be, not how they are. There are more TODOs than lines of code, and even when it works, it will probably only work for me. You should use something else.

How it works (or will work when it does)

Otto is a system for managing a web site stored in a git repository (although many of the tools will work fine without git). You can use Otto simply by adding a fabfile and a configuration file to your git repository.

It should work very much like you would expect when manually managing a content project using git. You create your content in files, check the files into git, push them to remote repositories, etc.

Using git hooks in the managed repositories, Otto performs transformations and other tasks on the content you check in. For example, when you check in a new Markdown file, Otto will automatically convert it to HTML (using the template you specified), and add it to any index pages you have configured.

Otto does not use a database. He stores all his management data in the file system, usually in JSON format. Because this data is stored in static files in your web directory, it effectively becomes an API to your content, given a properly configured web server (Otto can help you configure your web server too). Web sites managed by Otto are highly scalable, because they contain mostly static files.

In fact, you don't even have to install Otto on your web server! You can use Otto on your development machine to manage a static web site remotely. However, Otto does include a suite of server-side software to turn your web site into a true web application. Where possible, server-side code executes in the background when changes are made, not when site visitors make a request.

Current state as of 0.3.0

Most of what you see here is in a purely experimental stage. The only really useful bit is otto.web, a library of Fabric tasks used to automate web deployments. The author uses it to deploy several production web sites. The author also uses otto.cm to help configure the web server where the sites are deployed. However, it's kindergarten stuff and probably not useful to anyone but Vince.

The deployment code in otto.web is only suitable for static web sites. You are responsible for creating your own "build" task that will collect a local directory as you would like it to appear on the server. Otto then provides fab tasks for deploying to the server (or rolling back to a previous deployment). This makes it fairly simple to maintain a static HTML or Sphinx-built site in a git repo, requiring only a fabfile with a few lines of code to run the build.

Roadmap

Git push deployments. Add Git hooks that will allow Otto to take action on changes pushed to the repo. This should allow a smoother deployment path more like Heroku, where "deploy" and "push" are synonymous. This requires server side code and per-site virtualenv support, so that Otto can run the build tasks at the server.

Incremental deployment. Add the capability to deploy only files that have changed since the previous deployment, rather than rebuilding/redeploying the entire site. This will be necessary for large, rapidly growing sites.

Self-updating applications. Add the ability for a server-side process to add content to the repository for a site, triggering an incremental deploy. This would allow for building a web-based CMS or a cron-based aggregator using Git as the backing store.

veselosky/otto-webber

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