Smeagol - A Read-Only Gollum Server

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Smeagol is up for adoption if anyone finds it useful and would like to take over it's development. Please get in touch either via email or posting an issue.

Smeagol is a server that can run a read-only version of a Gollum wiki. This can be useful when you want to maintain a standalone website, but you want to update it through the Gollum wiki interface, e.g. via GitHub.

Smeagol follows the rules of Semantic Versioning and uses TomDoc for inline documentation.

STATUS

Currently Smeagol's core functionaily works, but it needs some love to clean up some rough spots.

INSTALLATION

You can install Smeagol with RubyGems:

$ [sudo] gem install smeagol

And then, if you want code highlighting, follow the Installation Guide for Pygments.

Ta da! You're ready to go.

Of course, the first thing you need to do is clone your Gollum wiki repo.

$ git clone [email protected]:user/user.github.com.git

USAGE

Previewing

To preview your site via smeagol, simply change directories to your Gollum repository and run smeagol preview from the command line:

$ cd /path/to/repo
$ smeagol preview

This will run a web server at http://localhost:4567. You can change the port by setting the --port or -p option on the command line.

Customizing

Of course, you want to customize your site to suit your style. To do this you need to add some Smeagol support files. Use the init command to have Smeagol put the default files in place.

$ cd path/to/wiki
$ smeagol init

In your wiki this will add a few files. One of these is _config.yml which you use to configure Smeagol for your site. See CONFIGURATION below.

There will also be a file called _layouts/page.mustache. Using Mustache templating use this file to create a custom page layout for your site. To learn more about the variables available for use in this template see the Smeagol Wiki.

Be sure to add these files to your repo and commit them. (You can just check these files in and push to the server. It will not effect you Gollum wiki in any way.)

Configuration

If you are familiar with Jekyll, the static site generator, you will notice that Smeagol follows the same convensions fairly closely. This has been done to reduce congnative load for those of us who use both tools, and to simplify transition to a static site should that ever needed.

The _config.yml file allows you to configure certain behaviors of Smeagol. An example _config.yml file:

---
port: 4000
host: 127.0.0.1
baseurl: "" # does not include hostname
sourceurl: http://github.com/trans

title: 7R4N5.C0D3
author: trans
description:
  Trans Programming Blog

menu:
- title: Homepage
  href: "/"
- title: RSS Feed
  href: "/rss.xml"
- title: Projects
  href: "http://github.com/trans"

See the API documentation for more details about each field.

NOTE The menu entry will be probably be deprecated in favor of just editing templates.

Serving

Smeagol can serve multiple Gollum repos simulataneously. To do this create a configuration file at ~/.smeagol/config.yml. An example file looks like this:

---
port: 3000
auto_update: true
cache_enabled: true
repositories:
  - path: ~/websites/acme/wiki
    cname: acme.org
    origin: '[email protected]:acme/acme.wiki.git'
    ref: master
    bare: false
    secret: X123

Then to serve the listed repositories use:

$ smeagol serve

Updating

There are two ways to handle updates of the repository through Smeagol: automatic updating and manual updating.

To setup Smeagol to automatically update your repository in fixed intervals, simply pass the --auto-update option in the smeagol-serve command and Smeagol will automatically perform a git pull origin master on your repository once per day.

To perform a manual update, simply go to the update route, e.g. http://localhost:4567/update, and Smeagol will perform a git pull. Of course, change the URL appropriately for your hostname and port.

ROADMAP

The most recent versions of Smeagol had focused on adding static site generation to the project. This goal has now been dropped. Static site generation, it turns out, is not an important goal for Smeagol becuase that can accomplished using other tools, particularly Jekyll, with only a modicum of extra work. In that light, we are currently updating Smeagol's configuration defaults to be as similar to Jekyll's as possible. This will facilitate the transition to static should that ever be required and more generally reduce the cognative load on developers. This also means the Liquid templating engine will likely be supported in the future, as an alterntive to the current Mustache engine.

CONTRIBUTING

Have a great idea for Smeagol? Awesome. Fork the repository and add a feature or fix a bug. There are a couple things we ask:

• Create an appropriately named topic branch that contains your change.
• Please try to provide tests for all code you check in.
• Use an apprpriate commit tag, such as :doc:, :test:, etc.

Note that Smeagol uses Citron and AE for testing. And admittedly this project is waterfalling too much at present. So if you would like to contribute, but don't have any specific request, writing a few tests would be a great help.

COPYRIGHTS

Smeagol is distributed under the terms of the BSD-2-Clause license.

• Copyright 2012 Rubyworks
• Copyright 2009 Ben Johnson

Please see LICENSE.txt file for details.