cub306.org

The public web site for pack 306 of Catonsville Maryland.

maintained by Thomas Cherry

Overview

The site is constructed around an Apache action which executes a CGI script that coverts Markdown to HTML via the Redcarpet gem.

Writing Pages

Apache of course will deliver HTML files as normal, however, with this setup one can also write Markdown files. All Markdown files will be converted to HTML and embedded into the default.erb file. This file is an HTML file with Ruby ERB statements. The basic web site layout will be handled by this file leaving the content to be handled by the Markdown file. Each Markdown file can optionally have a matching ERB file to handle more complicated layout issues. Both files must share the same name, only changing by extension.

• default.erb
  • most_files.md
• fancy.erb
  • fancy.md

Other Features

ERB files can include markdown files with:

<%=inject "/alerts.md"%>

Explicit HTML title setting by adding the following to the top of the page:

<!-- Title: Title_goes_here -->

If HTML title not set by title comment, then the first H1 header (single hash) in the first 5 lines is the HTML title.

# Title_goes_here #

Can add current ISO date and time with the "now" function

<!= now %>

Running on a Mac

Make the following changes to the apache config file :

...
LoadModule cgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_cgi.so
LoadModule actions_module libexec/apache2/mod_actions.so
...
#ScriptAliasMatch...    #yes remove this
...
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
...
Include /private/etc/apache2/vhosts/*.conf

Then create and edit the following file: sudo vim /private/etc/apache2/vhosts/cub306.site.conf

Then enter in the following, change as needed: ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/Users/thomas/Documents/src/project/catonsville-pack-306/cub306.org/public/cgi-bin/"

<Directory "/Users/thomas/Documents/src/project/catonsville-pack-306/cub306.org/public">
    AllowOverride None
    Options +ExecCGI
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Require all granted
</Directory>

<virtualHost *:80>
    DocumentRoot "/Users/thomas/Documents/src/project/catonsville-pack-306/cub306.org/public"
    ServerName cub306.local
    ErrorLog "/Users/thomas/Sites/var/log/cub306.site.error_log"

    <Directory "/Users/thomas/Documents/src/project/catonsville-pack-306/cub306.org/public">
        Options +Includes +FollowSymLinks +Indexes +ExecCGI
        AllowOverride All 
        Require all granted
        AddType type/html .shtml
        AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Finally restart apache with sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl

Apache may not find the gems installed for your user account, so you can try to update the version of ruby for the entire operating system (Macintosh in this case) as so:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.3/usr/bin
sudo ./gem install redcarpet
sudo ./gem install rqrcode

In other cases, such as on a hosting service, you may nat be able to install gems in this way. For these cases, you will need to use a "wrapper" such as qrc.cgi. Here the idea is to set the gem path and then call ruby:

#!/bin/bash
GEM_HOME=/home/<account_name_here>/.gems
export GEM_HOME
./qrcode.cgi

After making changes on a hosted system, you may need to run touch ~/cub306.org/public/tmp/restart.txt to get "Passenger" to recognize the change.