Blogit

Blogit is a blog engine backend written in Elixir. It turns a repository (by default git repository), containing markdown files into a list of blog posts, which can e queried. Blogit supports blog configuration in YAML, including blog title, path to custom stiles and images, etc.

There is a frontend implementation in phoenix, which uses Blogit - BlogitWeb. It can be clonned and configured to use any repository to build custom blog.

The blog for the Sofia University Elixir course runs on Blogit.

Installation

It is available in Hex, so the package can be installed as:

1. Add blogit to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

    def deps do
      [{:blogit, "~> 1.0.0"}]
    end

2. Ensure blogit is started before your application:

    def application do
      [applications: [:blogit]]
    end

Configuration

An example configuration for blogit is:

config :blogit,
  repository_url: "https://github.com/ElixirCourse/blog.git",
  polling: true, poll_interval: 300_000

Possible settings are:

• repository_url |> Tells Blogit the location of the repository to use to build its contents.
• polling |> Tells Blogit if it should poll the repository specified through repository_url for changes. By default it is true.
• poll_interval |> Used if polling is set to true. The polling for changes will happen on this interval of milliseconds. By default it is 10_000 milliseconds or 10 seconds.
• repository_provider |> Specified a specific implementation of the Blogit.RepositoryProvider behaviour. By default it uses Blogit.RepositoryProviders.Git which works with git repositories and knows how to check for changes in them.
• posts_folder |> The folder in which the markdown files will be transformed into blog post structures. By default it is the root of the repository.
• meta_divider |> The divider which divides the markdown file of a post into metadata and content. By default it is --------
• configuration_file |> Path to YAML file in the repository, which contains configuration for the blog. By default it is blog.yml.

Using these settings a custom blog can be created from whatever repository. It is not hard to write FTP repository provider or Ecto repository provider.

Usage

Blogit has a public interface which can be used to build a blog similar to BlogitWeb. When the application is configured and started, the following functions can be called:

• Blogit.list_posts(from \\ 0, size \\ 5)

  Returns a list of Blogit.Models.Post structures representing posts in the blog. The posts are sorted by their creation date, newest first.

  All the markdown files in the configured posts_folder will be transformed into Blogit.Models.Post structures and their created_at meta field will be read using the configured Blogit.RepositoryProvider.

  Posts can be skipped using the from argument, which is 0 by default. The size of the returned list is 5 by default, but it can be changed with the second argument of the function - size. By using these two arguments simple paging functionality can be implemented.

• Blogit.list_pinned()

  Returns a list of Blogit.Models.Post structures representing pinned posts in the blog. These posts are sorted by their last updated date.

  All the markdown files in the configured posts_folder will be transformed into Blogit.Models.Post structures and their updated_at meta field will be read using the configured Blogit.RepositoryProvider.

  Pinned posts are posts which have specified pinned: true in their meta data.

• Blogit.filter_posts(filters, from, size)

  Returns a list of Blogit.Models.Post structures, filtered by given criteria.

  The first argument of the function is a map of filters. This map supports zero or more of the following keys:

  • “author” - Used to filter posts by their .meta.author field.
  • “category” - Used to filter posts by their .meta.category field.
  • “tags” - Used to filter posts by their .meta.tags field. The value for this key should a string of comma separated tags ("one,two,three").
  • “year” - Used to filter posts by their .meta.year field.
  • “month” - Used to filter posts by their .meta.month field.
  • “q” - A query to filter posts by their content or title. Supports text in double quotes in order to search for phrases.

  All these keys must be strings.

  The other two arguments of the function can be used for paging. Filtered posts can be skipped using the from argument, which is 0 by default. The size of the returned list is 5 by default, but it can be changed with the third argument of the function - size.

  Example:

    filters = %{"q" => "OTP", "author" => "meddle", "tags" => "ab"}
    Blogit.filter_posts(filters)

• Blogit.posts_by_dates()

  Returns lists of posts grouped by years and then months for every year. Can be used for implementing an easy-to-browse view component by years/months.

  The result is list of tupples. The first element of a tuple is a year. The second is a month number. The third is a counter - how many posts are created during the month and the year.

  The tupes are sorted from the newest to the oldest, using the years

• Blogit.configuration()

  Retrieves the blog configuration. The configuration is in the form of a Blogit.Models.Configuration structure.

  It contains title and sub-title of the blog, path to log or backgorund image (or both), path to custom CSS file, etc..

License

The license is standard MIT license, feel free to fork Blogit and do whatever you want with it. You can also contribute to it.

Contributions

Just fork the Blogit repository and create a PR. You can also craete issues with features you wish we support. You can propse style changes on the code and additional tests.

All kinds of contributions are welcome!

How to create your own blog?

Blogit has a simple Phoenix frontend application : BlogitWeb.

Follow these steps to create your own blog:

1. For the aformentioned BlogitWeb project.

2. Modify its config/prod.exs configuration:

    config :blogit,
      repository_url: "<path-to-a-git-repository-with-your-posts>",
      polling: true, poll_interval: 300_000, mode: :prod,
      meta_divider: "--------", assets_path: "assets"

3. Deploy it somewhere.

   BlogitWeb depends on distillery and has a little bash script in its root, called build_release.sh. Just run it and it will build a release. You can also run it like this : ./build_release.sh --upgrade in order to create updated release. Follow distillery‘s notes when deploying.’

   BlogitWeb has a Dockerfile.build file which can be used to make a build in Docker if you don’t have Elixir installed. It has a Dockerfile too so you can try it locally.

4. When it is deployed just add new markdown posts to your repository specified in the configuration and it will be published authomatically.

Features to be implemented

• Multiple languages. This way we’ll have blogs that have streams in multiple languages.
• Pages (for example ‘about me’) and specific streams of posts, presented as pages.
• Slides. If we have a folder containing a specifically formated markdown (?) files, thwy could be turned into slides available on Blogit.
• Diffrent frontends for Blogit. Not only BlogtWeb. Also let’s keep BlogitWeb upto date, tested and documented. For now it is a bit messy, but usable.
• Multiple source formats for posts, not only MARKDONW.
• Additional repository providers.
• Docial media integrations.

Contact me

I’m Nikolay Tsvetinov (meddle) from elixir-lang.bg.

You can find me at:

• Twitter
• Github
• Gmail
• elixir-lang.bg