Telegraphy

Telegraphy is a web-based editor for text files in a git repository.

I keep all of my notes and to-do lists in plain text files, so I can edit and search them with tools like vim and grep. The files live in a git repository, so I can edit them on any computer. I wrote Telegraphy so that I could view and edit my notes from my mobile phone, or from other computers that don't have git installed.

If a conflict is detected on the Git repository, the conflict will be erased and the pushed version will be kept.

Install

Get the telegraphy source:

git clone git://github.com/mbrubeck/telegraphy.git

Telegraphy depends on Sinatra (web framework), Rugged (Git wrapper), json and Slim (HTML template engine). You may also need to add several Rugged dependencies, if they aren't automatically installed:

gem install sinatra rugged json slim
gem install simplecov hoe archive-tar-minitar nokogiri mime-types

Create the Telegraphy git repository:

cd telegraphy
./init.sh

This creates two git repositories, origin and workdir. They are linked together using git hooks, so commits to either repository will be pushed automatically to the other. Telegraphy reads from and writes to workdir, while origin is a bare repository for you to push and pull to.

Here's how to clone the empty Telegraphy repository and push your first commit to it:

git clone data/origin my-repository
cd my-repository
echo Hello >test.txt
git commit -m "Initial commit."
git push

Or you can push an existing git repository to the Telegraphy:

cd /path/to/existing-repository
git remote add telegraphy /path/to/telegraphy/data/origin
git push telegraphy master

Run

Run ruby -rubygems telegraphy.rb to start the application, then go to http://localhost:4567/ to view your files. Click on a file name to view or edit it. Your changes will be committed automatically to the git repository, and you can them pull them into any cloned repositories.

Deploy

To deploy Telegraphy to a Rack-enabled web server (e.g. Apache with mod_passenger), create a Rackup file like this in the telegraphy directory:

cat >config.ru <<EOF
require 'rubygems'
require 'telegraphy'
run Sinatra::Application
EOF

You can also use Rack middleware to add features like OpenID or password authentication. For example, to add (not very secure) basic authentication, you could add this above the run line in config.ru:

use Rack::Auth::Basic do |username, password| 
  username == 'me' && password == 'foo'
end

Check your server documentation and the [Sinatra Book][2] for more Rack configuration instructions.

To do

Secure authentication

If you want to join the project, just pull request.