Set up

Barista is all static files. However, for development ease and performance reasons, some pre-processing is done on the static files. HTML files are generated with HAML, CSS files are generated with Compass/SASS, and JS files are merged into one using Sprockets.

Generating the static files

Thanks to Tim Anglade, there's a nice script that watches all the source files for changes and compiles them automatically.

Prerequisites

gem install compass maruku sprockets fssm yui-compressor

Start development

Run:

./start

This will watch all .haml, .sass, and .js files for changes and regenerate the master.css, the master.js and all the .html files.

Web server config

While you can, in theory, run a Barista site in your browser as static files, I encourage you to view it through a web server, as that allows you to use absolute paths, and creates fewer surprises when you deploy.

The web server should be configured to add a proper Content-Type header so it won't mangle special characters. For Nginx:

charset utf-8;

All the static files should be gzipped:

gzip on;
gzip_types text/html text/css application/x-javascript;

The JS is already minified by the watch script. SASS automatically minifies the CSS.

All set up?

Proceed to the tutorial.