MANAGING CONTENT

You write your posts in HTML5. You can put whatever elements you like into your posts, but the database stores only the HTML. If you want to reference other resources, you will need to create web-visible directories to hold those resources.

There is no web interface for managing content because I would rather be rolled in seal oil and exposed to polar bears than use web-based tools. You manage the on-disk database with six munger(1) scripts that work with plain text. Five are command-line tools that can be used for one-off operations or shell scripting. The sixth is an interactive fullscreen database editor. The scripts send the server a SIGHUP to notify it to reload the database.

For example, you can add posts from remote hosts like this:

ssh user@host '/usr/local/bin/add.munger /path/to/db/ephemera.sqlite' < post.txt

My goodness. That is a prime candidate for a shell alias.

The munger scripts are located in /usr/local/bin and are documented internally with comments. All scripts require the path to the database file to be passed as a command line argument.

Ephemera serves up UTF-8 encoded web pages, but munger does not understand UTF-8. This means that you can use the munger scripts to manipulate UTF-8 articles, but the motion and search commands in edit.munger will move to the wrong locations on lines with multibyte characters.

The five command-line scripts are named create.munger, add.munger, replace.munger, delete.munger, and extract.munger.

The sixth script, edit.munger, is an interactive console program to view, add, delete, edit, and search for posts in the database. The following commands are available.

k

 

j

Move the cursor up or down one line. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

[

 

]

Move the cursor up or down one paragraph. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

[space]

 

[backspace]

Scroll the screen forward or backward one screenful. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

g

 

G

Move the cursor to the top or the bottom of the current screen.

0

 

$

Move the cursor to the start or end of the current line.

l

 

h

Move the cursor forward or backward by one character. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

w

 

b

Move the cursor forward or backward by one word. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

/ <pattern>

 

? <pattern>

Search forward or backward in the current screen for a match on a regular expression. Searches wrap-around. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

n

 

N

Repeat the last pattern search in the same or the opposite direction. These commands can be preceded with a repeat count.

q

Quit the database editor.

e

Extract the current post to a text file with the same name as the post's database Id.

s

Search the database using the SQLite full text search interface. Articles containing matches are added to the post list in reverse chronological order.

Control-l

Load the post list with all posts in reverse chronological order.

i

Toggle on or off the display of post Ids in the post list.

a

Add a new post to the database. The editor specifed by the EDITOR environment variable is run on an empty file.

Insert the post's complete title on the first line. Insert a blank line after the title line. The title is wrapped in an <h3> element when it is sent to clients.

Insert the post's body after the blank line. Markup the body to be proper HTML5. Both the title and body are inserted into a left-floated div. If you include block elements in your post bodies, then you must make them float left to render properly. Alternately, you can set the display property to inline-block. This is true of ol, ul, and pre elements.

d

Delete the current post.

[enter]

Load the current post into the viewer. When the viewer is onscreen, the following additional commands are available:

[enter]

Run the editor specified by the EDITOR environment variable on the current post.

u

Update the database. Do this when you exit from your editor if you want to preserve your changes.

q

Return to the post listing.

CONFIGURATION

If it cannot allocate memory from the system, ephemera exits. You need to set the maximum number of simultaneous connections with the -m option to a value that is suitable for your host's resources.

To configure ephemera:

1. Set the server options in /etc/rc.conf appropriately for your system. See SERVER OPTIONS.
2. copy /usr/local/share/ephemera/ephemera.config to the location you specify with the -f server option. Edit the file. Each setting is documented with a comment.
3. Configure your web server to forward requests for the resource you have described with "path" in ephemera.config to the interface you have described with "ephemera_flags" in /etc/rc.conf.
4. Copy ephemera.css, Merriweather-Bold.ttf, Merriweather-BoldIt.ttf, Merriweather-Light.ttf, and Merriweather-LightIt.ttf from /usr/local/share/ephemera to the directory that you specified with "web_directory" in ephemera.config.
5. Start your web server. Start ephemera with:

   service ephemera start

   Customize ephemera.css.

SERVER OPTIONS

The following command line options are available. To use an option, insert it into the value of the ephemera_flags variable in /etc/rc.conf. For example,

ephemera_enable="YES"
ephemera_flags="-u www -g www -l /var/run/ephemera.socket"

-f

The -f option specifies the path to the directory containing ephemera.config. This value defaults to /usr/local/etc.

-m

The -m option specifies the number of simultaneous connections the server will accept. The value defaults to 8192.

-u

 

-g

The -u and the -g options to specify the user and group of the server processes. Both values default to "nobody". If you use the -l option to make the server listen on a UNIX socket, then you must use these options to ensure that ephemera runs with the same user or group setting of the web server, or the webserver will not be able to connect to the socket.

-p

The argument to the -p option specifies the port to listen on. The port defaults to 4000.

-i

By default, ephemera accepts connections on all interfaces it can find capable of IPv4 or IPv6. The -i option overrides this behavior to limit drood to accepting connections from a specified interface only. Pass the IP address of the desired interface as argument.

-l

The -l option specifies the path to a UNIX-domain socket for the server to listen on. Use a UNIX socket instead of the loopback interface if the web server and ephemera run on the same host. Using the loopback address unnecessarily interposes the TCP/IP stack between the two servers, which degrades performance.

The -l option cannot be present on the command line if the -p or -i option is also present. The server creates the socket on startup. The owner and group of the socket is changed to the values of the -u and -g options. The permissions of the socket are set to srwxrwx---.

-x

The -x option prevents ephemera from becoming a daemon. The server runs in the foreground of the terminal where it is started. The server is stopped with signals (ie., Control-C).