Cargo

Still very much a work in progress: everything here is subject to change.

A simple flat-file framework.

var Cargo = require('cargo')

Cargo({

  'manifest path': 'data',
  'static path': 'public',

  'models': 'app/models',
  'routes': 'app/routes'
  
}).run()

Cargo.Manifest

Just rambling here for the moment

Loading files in Cargo should feel familiar if you've ever used Backbone, or an ORM/ODM. Manifest.Documents represent single files (think Models), while Manifest.Collections represent folders.

The quickest way to start using Manifest is with the 'documents' and 'collections' properties available in routes:

// in app/routes/views/some-view.js
module.exports = function (req, res) {
  // `document` is a generic instance of `Manifest.Document`.
  // We're telling it here to load the file '001.*.md' from the folder 'some-folder'
  // in the directory we supplied to Cargo's constructor ("data", in this case)
  req.documents.document(req.params.id, {path: 'some-folder'})
    .fetch()
    .then(function (doc) {
      res.render('index', doc.toJSON())
    }).catch(res.handleError)
}

You can make things easier on yourself by extending Manifest.Document classes. In our example app, Cargo will load any javascript files in app/models and register them with Mainfest.

Let's say we have a folder in our data directory called 'cats', and we want it to look like this:

data
  |-- cats
  |---- 001.fluffy.md
  |---- 002.butcher.md
  |---- 003.hairball-factory.md

In our app/models folder, we can create a cat.js module that looks like this:

// in app/models/cat.js

var Cargo = require('cargo')

var Cat = Cargo.Manifest.Document.extend({
  
  init: function () {
    this.path = 'cats'
    this.$map = { id:0, name:1 }
  }

})

module.exports = Cat

$map simply maps a segment in a filename to an attribute in the Document. For example, we've set things up here so that the file data/cats/001.fluffy.md will have the attributes {id: '001', name: 'fluffy'}.

To load our cat files, we just add a 'cats' route:

// in app/routes/views/cat.js
module.exports = function(req, res) {
  // 'req.documents.cat' is automatically generated for us
  req.documents.cat({name: req.params.name}).fetch().then(function (cat) {
    res.render('pages/cats', cat.toJSON())
  }).catch(res.handleError)
}

... and bind it to a route in app/routes/index.js:

var Cargo = require('cargo')
var imports = Cargo.util.createImporter(__dirname)

var views = imports('views')

module.exports = function (app) {
  app.get('cat/:name', views.cat)
}

Now when we start our Cargo app and navigate to cat/fluffy we'll see a page where data/cats/001.fluffy.md is loaded.

more to come, perhaps.

wartman/cargo

Cargo

Cargo.Manifest