Glan

Glan (Irish for "clean", pronounced /glawn/) is an extremely simple way to build a very fast, secure web site.

Use it when you don't need the advanced features of a CMS such as Drupal or Wordpress.

Features

• Extremely fast
• Totally secure against hacking
• Fully static, so can be served out of cheap cloud storage from Amazon or S3 (and optionally served through a CDN for worldwide speed)
• Markdown page authoring, so no HTML knowledge required
• Structured hierarchically
• Styled with Twitter Bootstrap
• Open source, so customizable and free forever (See LICENSE.md)

Authoring

To modify an existing Glan web site. you will need to make changes as follows

1. Edit the file web/site/config.json to set the title of the web site and other properties.
2. Replace the image web/site/logo.png with your logo
3. Edit the file web/site/footer.txt to set the text that goes on the bottom of each page.
4. Edit the file web/site/structure.json to specify all the pages in your web site and how they are arranged hierarchically.
5. For every entry in the structure.json add a .txt file in Markdown format in web/site/pages/. For example web/site/pages/home.txt is the home page.
6. Specify rotating images in web/site/rotimg/

Setup and Administration

The following instructions assume you are using a Linux machine, and will mosly be valid also on a Mac. If you have a Windows machine, you will probably want to install Cygwin to get a Unix-like command line.

Download or fork from https://github.com/eobrain/glan

[More instructions coming soon ...]

Deploying to Amazon S3

Prerequisites

• A Unix-like command line shell, such as on Linux, Mac, or Cygwin
• make, which is likely already installed on your Unix-like system
• s3cmd for command-line copying to S3.
• python for running a local test Web server
• coffeescript for generating JavaScript

On Ubuntu and similar Linux systems you can install necessary dependencies by doing

sudo apt-get install s3cmd coffeescript

Step-by step:

1. Create an Amazon AWS account if you don't already have one

2. In your browser go to the AWS console and go to the S3 area.

3. Create a bucket called, for example www.mydomain.com, and choose a region, for example us-west-1

4. In the Properties, enable Static Website Hosting and set the Index Document to index.html

5. Open the Makefile file in a text editor and modify the following at the top of the file:

   1. set the BUCKET variable to your S3 bucket name
   2. set the REGION variable to the region of your bucket

6. Open a command-line shell and cd to your Glan directory

7. If this is the first time using s3cmd with your AWS account in the current Glan installation, do

    make config
   

   and enter in your Amazon S3 access key and secret key. You can probably accept all the other defaults if you are deploying what will become a public website, except choose "n" to save the configuration to the local file s3.config. (Be careful to secure this file because whoever has this file can overwrite your website.)

8. Copy your dite to the bucket with

    make deploy
   

9. In your browser view the URL printed out by the previous command, and verify that you can see your site

10. Now you have three choices:

    1. Use the above Amazon domain for your web site
    2. Use DNS to setup a CNAME entry pointing from a domain of your own to the S3 domain. This must match the bucket name, so for example if your bucket is www.mydomain.com you must add a CNAME entry for www to your mydomain.com domain, pointing to s3-_region_.amazonaws.com
    3. Set up a download Cloudfront distribution whose origin is the above S3 bucket, with a CNAME of a subdomain whose DNS you control, and with a default root object of index.html. Then configure your DNS CNAME to point to the created distribution domain.

Viewing your Site on a Development Machine

To view your blog on your decelopment machine type

make server

This will start an HTTP server serving up your browser at http://localhost:4444