Locomotive

Locomotive is an open source platform to create, publish and edit sites. It is designed to save your time and help you focus on what matters: front-end technology, standard development process and no learning time for your client.

Locomotive relies on a very original workflow.

Sites are coded locally using our open source tool: Wagon. A desktop version (not open source) is also available here.
Sites are deployed to the platform (engine) thanks to our internal API.
A back-office for the end-users is automatically generated based on the custom models and editable regions described by the developers.

Visit the Locomotive official website here for more information.

Development Status

As you can see from the commit logs, we are intensively working on the new V3 version. We kept all the features from our stable v2 version, we just replace the UI, upgrade the gems and refactor our code.

[UPDATES] Finally, we've been doing much more than we planned at first. We extracted the rendering functionality from the Engine and make it a gem named Steam. This gem is also now used by Wagon (version 2.0 in progress) which makes sure you get the same result between Wagon and Engine when you preview a page. And last but not least, we added a Ruby API client for Locomotive that we called Coal. That client consumes the API from Engine which embeds now GrapeAPI. Nic Boie is in charge of it. Kudos to him!

TRELLO here

Getting Started

If you can not wait for playing with our new version, you still can use the current one (v2.5.x). Check out our installation guide.

Features

Multi-sites natively supported
Uses Liquid, a simple and clean templating language
Easy to add custom content types, no SQL needed
Beautiful and intuitive editing interface
Can fully localize all the content and pages
Embed a Restful API to manage every site
Develop and preview sites locally with your favorite tools (Wagon)
Support for SASS, LESS, HAML and Coffee Script (Wagon)

Technologies

Here is a list of the main gems used to power the Locomotive platform:

Rails 4.2 - web framework
Bootstrap - UI framework
Mongoid 5 - Object-Document-Mapper for MongoDB 2/3
Devise 3.4 - Authentication
Carrierwave - Upload
Pundit - Permissions

Community

Gitter for technical discussions.
Get help or discuss Locomotive at the Locomotive Google group
Follow us on twitter

Translating the back-office

By default, the Locomotive back-office is fully translated in English. But adding a new language is pretty straightforward since we now manage all our I18n translation keys in Transifex, a platform dedicated to this kind of task.

Here is our Transifex portal page: https://www.transifex.com/locomotive/locomotive-engine. Feel free to sign up and translate!

Contributing to Locomotive

Locomotive is an open source project, we encourage contributions. If you have found a bug and want to contribute a fix, or have a new feature you would like to add, follow the steps below to get your patch into the project:

Install ruby, mongoDB and phantomjs
Clone the project git clone git@github.com:locomotivecms/engine.git
Setup a virtual host entry for test.example.com to point to localhost
Start mongodb if it is not already running
Run the tests bundle exec rake
Write your failing tests
Make the tests pass
Create a GitHub pull request

For new features (especially large ones) it is best to create a topic on the Google group first to make sure it fits into the goals of the project.

Contact

Feel free to contact me at did at locomotivecms dot com.

railscard/engine