A minimalist blogging application.
The aim of the application is to enable a minimalist blogging site, whose entire publishing workflow is based around a git repo. Every page generated by this application follows the same general pattern: A list of available articles along with the text of the requested article.
In order to keep track of important metadata such as creation and
modification times, git is used as a database of sorts. The application
reads articles from the subdirectory articles/, which is expected
to be a git repository. The commit history of a given article provides
all necessary metadata.
The idea is to make all publishing happen via git, removing the need for an administrative interface while allowing a very streamlined publishing process. When writing a new article, all that is required to publish is simply to commit and push the file.
The HTML output of the program is entirely defined by the files under
support/, except of course the article contents which are produced
from markdown.
You will need a python3.7+ environment that fulfills
requirements.txt. A venv is recommended. The application doesn't
need write access to anything. Read access is necessary for the
articles/ and support/ subdirectories.
If you don't push directly to the web server's copy of the repo under
articles/, you will need some way to keep the articles up to date.
One way would be a scheduled task periodically pulling the repo. You
could probably also set up a github web hook to trigger a pull whenever
you push something. 🤷
For ease of debugging, blog.py can be called directly on the
command line. It expects the first argument to be the name of the article
to be rendered (so it will need to be quoted if it contains spaces). It
will output the rendered HTML for that article.
The application is generally intended to be run as a WSGI application under a web server. The testing stack is apache2.4 with mod_wsgi on Debian.
When running under WSGI, the application reads the article to be rendered
from environ['PATH_INFO']. Make sure any static files (mainly
style.css, but probably anything under public) is exposed by
the web server so the client can fetch them. blog.py will not serve
any such files on its own.