A simple website on Cloud Foundry

I’ve been remiss in blogging since switching job roles, so it’s about time to change that!

One of the goals of a Platform as a Service (PaaS) – like Cloud Foundry – is to enable developers to be more productive, more quickly. It’s about getting out of the way, removing the barriers and setup steps, and enabling developers to write and deploy great code as quickly as possible.

Something I’ve needed to do fairly often since starting work with Cloud Foundry is to quickly put up a “static” web site. The platform supports a number of runtimes and frameworks (Java, Ruby, node.js etc) but it doesn’t currently[1] have an runtime type of “website”. So, I can’t simply put together a bunch of HTML, CSS, images and client-side Javascript files, run vmc push, and have my site online on cloudfoundry.com – I need an “application” to serve the web content.

That’s exactly what my sinatra-static-web project does for me. I’ve found that it’s a very handy and quick template application which enables me to get simple static sites up on Cloud Foundry, and a good starting point to build out from if I want to stretch my Ruby skills 🙂

To use it, simply fork or clone the project using Git; replace the entire contents of the public directory with your HTML, CSS and JS files (with an index.html file as the main page); potentially adjust a couple of settings in the web.rb file; and vmc push the app. You can take a look at the sample site I’ve added to the app, of course… it’s just a load of junk content based on Twitter Bootstrap and with some random Lorem Ipsum-style text to fill it out.

There’s no real need to go near the code, and it is trivial at any rate – but let’s take a quick look.

# a super-trivial Sinatra-based webserver
# for static content
require 'sinatra'

# set all the settings!

configure do
  # this is arguably not necessary... 'public'
  # folder is the static content location by default
  set :public_folder, 'public'

  # optionally configure Cache-Control headers on responses
  # set :static_cache_control, [:public, :max_age => 300]

  # if using mime types not known to Sinatra, uncomment and
  # configure here (by file extension)
  # mime_type :foo, 'text/foo'
end

# serve the files!

# route to starting page (index.html)
get "/" do
  redirect '/index.html'
end

# route to custom error page (404.html)
not_found do
  redirect '/404.html'
end

The code uses the super-handy Sinatra framework for Ruby, which allows an application with multiple URLs to be defined very quickly. In this case, we simply declare a dependency on Sinatra; set the public folder as the one where the static content resides; and then create a default route, so that when a user hits our root URL / they are redirected to the index.html file. We also create an error route so that if the user hits a URL that doesn’t exist, they receive a customised but simple 404 error page (assuming that such a file exists in the public folder!).

As you can see, there’s really only a few lines of code here, and the rest is handled by the framework. I’ve commented out a couple of optional parameters that can be used if desired, but without any changes this will serve the contents of the public folder perfectly happily.

I’ve used this a few times now, for sites of varying levels of complexity – in particular the resources site I created for Cloud Foundry’s sponsorship of Young Rewired State was based on this (the source code is on Github if you want to take a look at that, too – it’s understandably extremely similar!). I was also able to use it to help a number of students who I worked with at YRS 2012 to get their sites online. More on YRS, shortly…

Just a simple little resource that you might find handy for prototyping your next web UI – you don’t even need to know Ruby, Java, or node.js to get going!

[1] … note that I’m not saying that Cloud Foundry should have or will have such a type of container in the future – but the code base is Open Source, so there’s every chance that someone will come along and add this kind of thing one day!

Update 05 March 2013: I just pushed a few changes to the app to reflect a slight change in the way Sinatra apps work on Cloud Foundry now. Use the source!