Sprinkles

User Guide - Getting Started

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  • Getting Started

    Prerequisites

    Installation

    Head over to the Download section and grab a copy of Sprinkles. Follow the included installation instructions.

    Your First Project

    1. Create a directory for your project.
    2. Inside that directory, create a file named project.yml, and paste the following code into it:

    3. Create a directory data in your project directory, and inside that, a directory named pages. Then create a file named home.markdown in that directory, and paste the following code:

    4. Create a directory templates in your project directory, and inside that, create a file named page.html; paste the following code:

      You should now have a directory structure like this:

      +-- project.yml
      |
      +-- data
      |    |
      |    +-- pages
      |         |
      |         +-- home.markdown
      |
      +-- templates
           |
           +-- page.html
    5. Open a terminal in the project directory, and issue the following command:

      sprinkles -serve 5000

      If all goes well, you’ll see a line saying something like:

      2016-08-15 17:21:06.162955 UTC [Notice] Running server on port 5000
    6. Point your web browser at http://localhost:5000. You should see a barebones HTML page titled “Home”, that says “Hello, world!”.

    What Just Happened?

    In project.yml, you defined a route. A route defines a rule that tells Sprinkles:

    Making Routes Dynamic

    A route that always serves the same file isn’t very powerful. Here’s how to parametrize routes.

    1. Add the following to the bottom of your project.yml:

    2. Restart your Sprinkles server, and navigate to http://localhost:5000/home. Verify that it displays the same page as http://localhost:5000.

    3. Now create another markdown file ./data/pages/example.markdown.

    4. Navigate to http://localhost:5000/example. Observe how it displays the text from example.markdown, using the same template as before.

    The pattern: used in this second route contains a dynamic part, the bit between double curly braces. Inside, the asterisk (*) means “match any one path element in its entirety”, and it is bound to the variable page.

    This means that our route pattern will match anything that starts with /, followed by exactly one path item and no slashes. It will, thus, match /foobar, /pizza, /12345, /oh-no.jpg, but not /foo/bar.

    In the data: part, the page value is injected into the data source specifier. So when a visitor requests /home, the “home” part gets captured as page, and inserting it into the data source string gives file://./data/pages/home.markdown.

    Adding Static Assets

    The HTML produced so far has been rather bland, so you will want to add CSS.

    1. Create a file ./static/css/style.css:

    2. Add a rule to the stylesheet for serving static files:

    3. Navigate to http://localhost:5000/static/css/style.css, and verify that it serves the stylesheet.

    4. Link to it from the HTML by adding a <link> tag to the template. Add this to the <head> section:

    5. Check the site root again; the HTML should now look a little bit less bland.

    Note that: