Baibulo (version in Chewa) is a versioned static content server and manager package for Node express applications. It is a version of implementation of approach presented on RailsConf 2014 by Luke Melia.
The solution comes in the form of a servlet com.aplaline.baibulo.StaticContentManager. The following is a basic usage example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
version="3.0">
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Baibulo</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.aplaline.baibulo.StaticContentManager</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>root</param-name>
<param-value>/tmp/baibulo</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>upload-enabled</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Baibulo</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/assets/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
</web-app>
As you can see there are 2 different parameters that can be adjusted:
root - the root folder on the filesystem that all versioned files will be stored in
upload-enabled - a flag that enables uploading of new content. Setting it to false (for example in production) disables the upload thus providing a secure way of serving content to the general public. Nothing stands in the way of having additional server running on an internal IP address that would allow for upload. After all this is just file system that is being used as storage.
The servlet-mapping determines what will be the root URL for all content. So for example if the context name is hello, the servlet-mapping's url-pattern points to /assets/* and the file name is image.png then the full path will be /hello/assets/image.png.
The deployment can be done either using cURL or with a dedicated utility called baibulo-deploy written as a Node.js package. See https://github.com/aplaline/baibulo-deploy for further information about that utility.
For now let's concentrate on how to deploy a single file in a specific version using cURL.
curl -v -X PUT \
--data-binary "@image.png" \
-H "Version: TST-1234" \
http://localhost:8080/hello/assets/image.png
Alternatively to the Version header you can use the query string parameter named version like so:
curl -v -X PUT \
--data-binary "@image.png" \
http://localhost:8080/hello/assets/image.png?version=TST-1234
When uploading assets Baibulo has a 2 step process that tries to figure out what version should the asset be in:
- Query string parameter named
version - Header
Version
If none is specified the upload fails.
When retrieving content Baibulo has 4 stages at which it tries to determine the version which should be served:
- Query string parameter named
version - Header
Version - Header
Referrerand its query string parameterversion - Cookie
__version
If none will be found then the version name release will be used.
Baibulo stores the content of static assets in folders with the name of the file and underneeth it there are files with the actual version name. For a simple index.html in version TST-1234 (mimicing a Jira ticket number) the structure would look like that:
/
/index.html
/TST-1234
In the future there will be options to store the assets in other storages, such as SQL and NoSQL databases, maybe even in S3 or other cloud storages.
The project is managed using Maven. Simply import it to your favorite IDE and get to hacking!
To deploy to central you need to have the proper Maven setup. You can read more about it on https://central.sonatype.org/pages/apache-maven.html.
Command for running the release:
$ mvn release:prepare -P release
$ mvn release:perform -P release
The release profile enables GPG signing required by Sonatype's OSS repository and sets the version numbering to be @{project.version} instead of the default combination of @{project.artifactId}-@{project.version} - just because it is cleaner.