Cascading, Highly Irrelevant, Lost Llamas

Or, just chill. This is a database driven web application framework in Flask and it can be used to create static or dynamic web sites.

This involves creating custom SQL queries to pull data from a database and uses Jinja2 HTML templates to populate pages for a website. Chill can create static files for the website or can run as a Flask app and build pages on request.

Chill is database driven when it comes to handling http requests. Each http request uses data from the database when determining what content to show on the page as well as what HTML templates to use. Content for a page can come from other database queries and can recursively call other queries when populating the page.

Installing

Chill can be installed via pip.

python3 -m pip install chill

Or from within this cloned project; install with pip in editable mode. It is recommended to setup a virtual environment first.

# Create a python virtual environment in the project directory and activate it.
python3 -m venv .
source ./bin/activate

# Install chill in editable mode
python3 -m pip install -e .

This will create a script called chill. Type chill --help for help on using it. It will need a config file and such. I recommend creating an empty directory and running chill init within it. That will create a site.cfg config file and the bare minimum to show a homepage. Run the chill run --config site.cfg and visit http://localhost:5000/ with your browser.

Quick start

Run the chill init script in an empty directory and it will create a minimal starting point for using Chill. The site.cfg created will have comments on each configuration value. The chill run --config site.cfg will run the app in the foreground at the http://localhost:5000/ URL. Notice that the script also creates a sqlite database file (default file name is 'db') in that directory. This database file is what chill uses to display the pages in a site.

Review the docs for more. Some helpful guides and such are in the docs/ folder. The tests.py file within the chill package is also a good resource.

Static site generator

The command chill freeze --config site.cfg will go through all the URLs and create a static version of each page. It places all the necessary files in a folder which can then be uploaded to a static web server. This is a wrapper around the Frozen-Flask python package. Which is partly the inspiration behind the name 'chill'. Also, llamas are cool and have two 'l's like chill.

Websites using chill

• Puzzle Massive - Massively Multiplayer Online Jigsaw Puzzles
• Web of Tomorrow - A web developer's website about web development
• Awesome Mud Works - Pottery studio in Salt Lake City, Utah

Docker

I've included a Dockerfile which can be used when creating a container for chill. See the guide on using chill with docker.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

Please make sure to update tests as appropriate.

License

GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0