Serve Bootstrap is a stripped-down website prototype starting point for Serve.

It features HTML5 Boilerplate, Haml, Sass, Compass, your choice of grid frameworks, and lots of best practices.

Serve is distributed as a Ruby gem to make it easy to get up and running. You must have Ruby installed in order to download and use Serve. The Ruby download page provides instructions for getting Ruby setup on different platforms:

http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

After you have Ruby installed, open up the command prompt and type:

gem install bundler

(OSX and Unix users may need to prefix the command with sudo.)

Because we're using Bundler to handle gem dependencies, we can install all the required gems (including Serve itself!) by 'cd'-ing to the Serve Bootstrap directory and typing:

bundle install

After Serve is installed, you can start it up in a given directory like this:

serve

This will start Serve on port 4000. You can now view the prototype in your Web browser at this URL:

http://localhost:4000

Serve Bootstrap uses Compass & Sass to generate CSS, and Haml & Markdown to generate HTML.

Learn more about Sass: http://sass-lang.org

Learn more about Compass: http://compass-style.org

Learn more about Haml: http://haml-lang.com/

Learn more about Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Astute users may notice that this project is also a simple Rack application. This means that it is easy to deploy it on Passenger or in any other Rack-friendly environment. Rack it up with the rackup command. For more information about using Serve and Passenger see:

http://bit.ly/serve-and-passenger

To export your project, use the "export" command:

serve export <project>:<output>

Where "project" is the path to the project and "output" is the path to the directory where you would like your HTML and CSS generated.

You can learn more about Serve on its GitHub project page:

http://github.com/jlong/serve