DonkeySimple 0.20.03

Super Simple python system for building and deploying static websites

Copyright (C) 2013-2014 Samuel Colvin [e-mail]

License: The MIT License (MIT)

Donkey Simple is an extremely simple platform for building static websites either from a web interface or the command line.

It uses Werkzeug, Jinja2, Ace Code Editor and Markdown to make writing the site as painless as possible.

The pages, templates, static files and config files which make up the site are stored in a git repository so you can easily manage the version history of your site.

Once you’ve written your site, it is generated ONCE and then saved as static files, meaning the site is FAST, REALLY FAST in a way dynamic sites build from templates using lots of database calls and slow interpretted languages so rarely are.

DonkeySimple was built to work with Apache (it comes with .htaccess files) but it should be extremely simple to use it with other server. Similarly it has only been tested on Linux and Mac OS, however there’s nothing fundamental to stop it running on windows.

View the code and download it at github.com/samuelcolvin/donkey-simple. Donkey Simple is available through PyPi pypi.python.org/pypi/DonkeySimple.

Quick Start

sudo pip install DonkeySimple
donkeysimple create my_new_site
cd ./my_new_site
donkeysimple runserver
# go to localhost:4000

Then edit ./my_new_site/settings.py.

If you’re running this on a server set REQUIRE_AUTH = True and change your username/password from the defaults: donkey/simple.

Documentation

(These docs assume you’re setting up Donkey Simple to work with Apache on Ubuntu, but they should give you the gist of the process on other linux variants and Mac OS, even Windows and other web servers (like nginx and lighttpd) shouldn’t be that different. However you might have problems with windows paths.)

To Install run:

[sudpo] pip install DonkeySimple

You should then be able to use the command line utility donkeysimple, to show options:

donkeysimple --help

To build a new site run

donkeysimple create my_new_site

which will create a new site template at working/directory/my_new_site. Eg. you might think of running this command from /var/www/home/ to create /var/www/my_new_site.

(More details on what the donkeysimple utility can do can be found by running donkeysimple --help.)

You can then use the system on a dev server by running

donkeysimple runserver

from within the new site directory.

You might also think about changing the password for the default user, you can do this by going into my_new_site and running.

donkeysimple edituser

Once you’ve run “generate site” you can host the resulting site anywhere.

To host the donkey simple web interface is only a little more complicated, it’s a standard Werkzeug application so it can run via cgi, wsgi or the dev server as above.

Example .htaccess are generated on create (see above).

Building (You can probably ignore this)

If you download the source (eg. from github as opposed to installing with pip) you should run python mini_build.py prior to installing. All this does is download the static files for the web interface and generate the docs.txt file for PyPi’s long_description, for this you will require pandoc and pyandoc.