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App-Dapper-0.14
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Dapper

A publishing tool for static websites.

Distributed as a Perl module, App::Dapper comes with an application called dapper which you can use from the command line and makes it easy to use the App::Dapper perl module to create static websites.

Dapper has three goals:

  1. Simple. Learning Dapper is easy -- it gets out of the way so you can write content, develop layouts, and deploy to production the way you want.

  2. Opinionated. Content is written in Markdown, templates are written in Liquid. Dapper combines the two and creates a static website based on your instructions.

  3. Pragmatic. The easy things are easy and the hard things are possible. Dapper was created to solve problems in a straight-forward and intuitive way.

Here are some feature highlights of Dapper:

The rest of this document shows you how to get your static site set up and running, how to create and manage content, how to tweak the way it looks, and how to deploy to various environments.

Getting Started

The following sections introduce you to Dapper, why it exists, and how it's different from other static site generators. In addition, you'll find instructions for how to install, upgrade, and downgrade the version of Dapper you have, as well as how to use the dappercommand-line utility and work with the directory structure it creates.

Welcome

Welcome to Dapper -- a publishing tool for static websites. In recent years, static website generators have become popular. This is for a few reasons:

  1. Fast. Static pages are fast to load and easy to cache. Content management systems, on the other hand, may contact the database at least one time per page request, process the results, merge with a templating system, and serve the result to the user's web browser.

  2. Cheap. Having a static website means that options for hosting those static files also just got a lot more simple. No database is needed and no real processing power for scripting is needed. For example, with a static website, it becomes possible to host the site on Github Pages for free, or Amazon S3 for very modest fees.

  3. Secure. It's much more secure to host a static website than a dynamic one. Content management systems that use scripting languages such as Perl, Python, or Ruby, all are more susceptible to being hacked than a static website is. Simply stated, why use a dynamic content-management system if a static setup will do?

  4. Portable. With a static website, it's way easier to move the site to a new host in the future. All web hosts now and in the future support serving up a static website -- think of it as the lowest common denominator -- and so there's no need to pick a premium host with premium services.

Dapper was written in 2002 to facilitate creating multiple variations of a static website that each have shared content but different layouts and colors. Since that time, it has been used to create websites for speakers, artists, authors, illusionists, web designers, piano tuners, photographers, entertainment agencies, and API documentation for industrial sensing equipment. In addition, it is the tool that powers Vanilla Draft. In 2014, Dapper was submitted as a Perl module (App::Dapper) to CPAN under the MIT license for anyone to use for any purpose.

Quick-Start Guide

The following quick start guide shows you how to install Dapper, upgrade to newer versions, downgrade to older versions, use the command-line tool to create and manage static websites, and understand the directory structure that Dapper depends on.

Install

Install Dapper in seconds:

$ cpanm App::Dapper

Then, create a new site, build it, and view it locally like so:

$ mkdir new-site && cd new-site
$ dapper init
$ dapper build
$ dapper serve

After that, browse to http://localhost:8000 to see your site. To modify the content, look at _source/index.md. To modify the layout, edit _layout/index.html.

Upgrade

Find out which version of Dapper you have, by using the -v option:

$ dapper -v

You can compare this with the latest version from CPAN like this:

$ cpan -D App::Dapper

...
M/MD/MDB/App-Dapper-0.13.tar.gz
/Library/Perl/5.16/App/Dapper.pm
Installed: 0.12
CPAN:      0.13  Not up to date
Mark Benson (MDB)
markbenson@vanilladraft.com

Install the latest version with this:

$ cpan App::Dapper

If you like living on the edge, install from the latest development tip like this:

$ cpanm git://github.com/markdbenson/dapper.git

A list of commits can be viewed on Github.

Downgrade

To make it easier, you can also do it with the cpanm tool. Here is an example on how to install Dapper v0.13.

$ cpanm http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/M/MD/MDB/App-Dapper-0.13.tar.gz

If you want, you can also install from source. To do that, you just need to download and unpack a release from backpan, then do this:

$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Dapper requires Perl 5.14 or greater. To find which version of dapper you have installed, do this:

$ dapper -v

Basic Usage

When you install the App::Dapper Perl module, an executable named dapper will be available to you in your terminal window. You can use this executable in a number of ways:

Directory Structure

Dapper helps you build static websites. To get you started, you can use the dapper init command to initialize a directory. After running this command, the following directory structure will be created:

_config.yml
_layout/
    index.html
_source/
    index.md

Now, let's walk through each file:

_config.yml

The configuration file is a YAML file that specifies key configuration elements for your static website. The default configuration file is as follows:

---
name : My Site

If you want to use a separate source, layout, or output directory, you may specify it in this file. For instance:

---
name : My Site
source : _source
layout : _layout
output : _output

All of the configurations in this file are available in layout templates, based on the Liquid template system. For instance, name in the configuration file may be used in a template as follows:

{{ site.name }}

_source/index.md

A sample markdown file is available in the _source directory. Contents:

---
layout: index
title: Welcome
---

Hello world.

There are a few things to note about this file:

  1. There is a YAML configuration block at the start of the file.

  2. The layout configuration specifies which layout to use.

  3. The index layout indicates that _layout/index.html should be used.

  4. The title configuration is the name of the post/page. It is optional.

  5. All of the configurations may be used in the corresponding layout file.

    {{ page.name }}

_layout/index.html

Layout files are processed using the Liquid template system. The initial layout file that is given after you run the dapper init command, is this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>{{ page.title }}</title>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>

{{ page.content }}

</body>
</html>

The main content of the text file that is being rendered with this template is available using {{ page.content }}.

Definitions specified in the _config.yml file can be referenced under the "site" namespace (e.g. {{ site.name }}. Definitions specified in the YAML portion of text files can be referenced under the "page" namespace (e.g. {{ page.title }}.

In that same directory, you may then build the site using the dapper build command, which will combine the source files and the layout files and place the results in the output directory (default: _output). After you build the default site, you'll then have the following directory structure:

_config.yml
_layout/
    index.html
_source/
    index.md
_output/
    index.html

Now, you'll see a new directory that has been created (_output) that contains a single file (index.html) containing a mashup of the source file and the layout template.

_output/index.html

The output file that is created is a mix of the input file and the layout that is specified by the input file. For the default site, the following output file is created:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
  <title>Welcome</title>
  <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>

<body>

<p>Hello world.</p>

</body>
</html>

Next Steps

Now that you have Dapper installed and have a project that builds and can be viewed, try out a few things:

  1. Modify the content
  2. Modify the layout
  3. Add content

Deployment

To deploy your content, you have a number of options. This section outlines a few of them.

Amazon S3

It's possible to serve a static website using Amazon S3. Here's how.

  1. Go to Amazon's AWS Console and create 2 buckets: 'www.mydomain.com' and 'mydomain.com'. Content will be loaded into the 'mydomain.com' bucket and 'www.mydomain.com' will just point to it.

  2. Under the properties for the 'www.mydomain.com' bucket, choose 'redirect all
    requests to another host name' under 'Static Web Hosting'.

  3. Under properties for 'mysite.com', choose 'enable website hosting' under 'Static Web Hosting', and set 'Index Document' to 'index.html'.

  4. Install s3cmd. On Mac OSX, using Homebrew, install like this:

    $ pip install s3cmd

  5. Configure s3cmd with your Amazon credentials (AWS access key, secret key):

    $ s3cmd --configure

  6. Now any time you want to rebuild your content and push it to s3, it's a simple call to:

    $ s3cmd sync _output/ s3://mydomain.com --reduced-redundancy --acl-public --delete-removed

    A few notes about the options. First, --reduced-redundancy tells Amazon that your website content is non-critical and easily reproducible if there is a problem. It means your charges from Amazon will be less and is a good option for most static sites.

    Second, the --acl-public option makes everything in the bucket public, which is what we want for a static website. We want the world to have read access to the contents of the bucket, and --acl-public accomplishes this.

    Third, the --delete-removed option tells s3cmd to delete files in the bucket that are not stored locally. This cleans things up so that you don't have lots of extra crap sitting in your bucket that isn't being used, but is costing you money. If you upload image files independently of Dapper or s3cmd, you may want to not use this option.

An optional step is to route traffic to your website through Amazon's Route 53. To do this, follow these steps:

  1. Create 2 A records, one for 'mydomain.com' and one for 'www.mydomain.com'.

  2. For each A record, set 'Alias' to yes, and set 'Alias Target' to the S3 bucket with the same name.

To make it easy to publish to Amazon S3, one option is to create a Makefile that encodes the publishing instructions. Here is a Makefile that I use for Vanilla Draft:

BASEDIR=$(CURDIR)
INPUTDIR=$(BASEDIR)/_source
OUTPUTDIR=$(BASEDIR)/_output

S3_BUCKET=vanilladraft.com

build:
	dapper build

serve: build
	dapper serve

publish: build
	s3cmd sync $(OUTPUTDIR)/ s3://$(S3_BUCKET) --reduced-redundancy --acl-public --delete-removed

watch:
	dapper watch

.PHONY: build serve publish watch

FTP

FTP is perhaps the most simple option. Just upload the contents of your _output directory to the directory on your server that is served by your webserver application.

Further Reading

You can look for more information here:

Appendix B: Working with the Perl Module Directly

Dapper may be used as a perl module directly from a script. Examples:

use App::Dapper;

# Create a Dapper object
my $d = App::Dapper->new();

# Initialize a new website in the current directory
$d->init();

# Build the site
$d->build();

# Serve the site locally at http://localhost:8000
$d->serve();

After installing Dapper, you can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc App::Dapper

Author

Dapper was written by Mark Benson markbenson@vanilladraft.com.

License and Copyright

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2002-2014 Mark Benson

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.