breakdown 1.0.3

Lightweight jinja2 template prototyping server

Description
===========

Breakdown is a lightweight python webserver that parses jinja2 templates. It's intended to be used by designers for doing rapid prototyping.


Basic Usage
===========

Breakdown needs a ``templates`` directory and a ``static`` directory to serve from. If your working directory contains these, you can simply run breakdown with no arguments::

$ breakdown

Or, you can specify the path to a directory containing ``templates`` and ``static``::

$ breakdown /path/to/project

Breakdown will also work with a django project structure. If the project path contains an ``apps`` directory, breakdown will automatically detect this and combine the ``static`` and ``templates`` directories for each django app. You'll also get a listing of the directories it found. Here's the output of running breakdown on a django project with two apps: 'mainsite' and 'blog'::

$ breakdown ~/django/myproject
Serving templates from:
/Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/templates
/Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/templates

Serving static data from:
/Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/static
/Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/static

Template Context Objects
------------------------

When loading a template, breakdown will attempt to load a json dictionary of the same name from the context directory (``context`` by default) and add it to the page context. For example, when loading ``base.html`` breakdown will try to load ``<project root>/context/base.json``, and when loading ``blog/article_detail.html`` breakdown will look for ``<project root>/context/blog/article_detail.json``.

Objects defined in a context dictionary become available to the template. For example, if we define ``base.json`` like this::

{
"request": {
"user": {
"name":"Austin",
"member": "Member #4812"
}
},
"object": {
"id": 555,
"title": "Excellent Blog Post"
}
}

then ``request`` and ``object`` become available to the ``base.html`` template, and ``{{request.user.name}}`` yields ``Austin``.

You can specify a function by adding a key with trailing parentheses::

{
"request": {
"user": {
"name":"Austin",
"is_authenticated()": true,
"birth_year()": 1982,
"middle_name()": "David",
"member": "Member #4812"
}
}
}

The trailing parentheses are removed, and now ``{{request.user.is_authenticated()}}`` returns ``True``. Functions defined in this way ignore any arguments and return the value specified in the json dictionary. ``{{request.user.is_authenticated(arg1, arg2, arg3)}}`` also returns ``True``.


Viewing Templates
-----------------

Once breakdown is running, it will print the local URL the webserver is listening on::

Server running at http://127.0.0.1:5000 ...

You can now view templates in your browser by navigating to http://127.0.0.1:5000. However, you won't see anything here unless one of your template directories contains a file named ``index.html``. The URL of any template (besides ``index.html``) will be identical to its filename, with all relative paths preserved. Below is an example of template filenames and their corresponding URL on the local server:

==================== ====================================
**Template** **URL**
-------------------- ------------------------------------
index.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/
article.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/article
blog/index.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog
blog/post.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/post
==================== ====================================

*Note: The server will accept template URLs with or without .html appended to them*

Additional Features
===================

Template tags
-------------

For convenience, A few template functions have been added to the `jinja2 template API <http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/templates/>`_:

################
{{ greeking() }}
################

Generates a block of randomized lorem ipsum text marked-up with various HTML elements: ``<em>``, ``<strong>``, ``<code>``, ``<a>``, ``<ol>``, and ``<ul>``.

##########################
{{ image(width, height) }}
##########################

If you have `PIL <http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/>`_ installed, you can use this function to generate an ``<img>`` tag with a sample image of the specified size (without PIL, the width/height are ignored and you get a large sample image)

##########################
{{ url(*args, **kwargs) }}
##########################

Ignores all arguments and returns ``'#'``.

CleverCSS
---------

Breakdown also supports automatic `CleverCSS <http://http://sandbox.pocoo.org/clevercss/>`_ parsing. If the file ``foo.css`` is requested and not found, breakdown will then look for a matching ``foo.clevercss`` and compile it to vanilla css on the fly.


Advanced
========

**Command line options**:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-p PORT, --port=PORT run server on an alternate port (default is 5000)
-m, --media treat MEDIA_URL as STATIC_URL in templates
-v, --version display the version number and exit
-c DIR, --context_dir_name=DIR set the directory name for context object files (default is ``context``)