What is this?

It took me a little while to get serve set up the way I wanted to use it, so I thought I'd create this starting point. I haven't done any heroic programing efforts to the serve project. This project has a slightly modified version of the Less Framework ready to go in the way that I like to use it.

Here's the Serve Readme

This is a simple HTML prototype written in HAML or ERB that is designed to be viewed with Serve.

What is Serve? Serve is an open-source rapid prototyping framework for Web applications. It makes it easy to prototype functionality without writing a single line of backend code.

How do I install and run Serve?

Serve is distributed as a Ruby gem to make it easy to get up and running. You must have Ruby installed in order to download and use Serve. The Ruby download page provides instructions for getting Ruby setup on different platforms:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

After you have Ruby installed, open up the command prompt and type:

gem install serve

(OSX and Unix users may need to prefix the command with sudo.)

After Serve is installed, you can start it up in a given directory like this:

serve

This will start Serve on port 4000. You can now view the prototype in your Web browser at this URL:

http://localhost:4000

Compass and Sass

This prototype uses Compass and Sass to generate CSS. Both are distributed as Ruby gems and can be easily installed from the command prompt. Since the Compass gem depends on Sass, you can install them both with one command:

gem install compass

Learn more about Sass:

http://sass-lang.org

Learn more about Compass:

http://compass-style.org

Rack and Passenger

Astute users may notice that this project is also a simple Rack application. This means that it is easy to deploy it on Passenger or in any other Rack-friendly environment. Rack it up with the rackup command. For more information about using Serve and Passenger see:

http://bit.ly/serve-and-passenger

Exporting

To export this project to pure HTML and CSS you will need the prerelease version of Serve. To get started with the prerelease version:

gem install --pre serve

To export your project, use the new "export" command:

serve export <project>:<output>

Where "project" is the path to the project and "output" is the path to the directory where you would like your HTML and CSS generated.

Learning More

You can learn more about Serve on the GitHub project page:

http://github.com/jlong/serve