Slimdown

Slimdown is a simple gem to allow you to easily add static pages to your app via a folder full of Markdown files.

Justin Heideman conceived and built the original version in PHP.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'slimdown'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install slimdown

Usage

To add to your app, create a controller with one action, such as show. In that action, add code to pull in the action:

class SlimdownController < ApplicationController
  def show
    @page = Slimdown::Page.find(params[:slug])
  end
end

Then add a view for the show action.

<%= @page.body.to_html.html_safe %>

<h2>Sibling Pages</h2>
<ul>
  <% @page.siblings.each do |sibling| %>
    <li><%= link_to sibling.title, "/#{sibling.path}" %></li>
  <% end %>
</ul>

<h2>Child Pages</h2>
<ul>
  <% @page.children.each do |child| %>
    <li><%= link_to child.title, "/#{child.path}" %></li>
  <% end %>
</ul>

Add a route to direct all unhandled requests to your controller. Make sure that it is at the end of your routes.rb so it doesn't supersede other routes.

get '/*slug', to: 'slimdown#show'

Finally, add an initializer in config/initializers/slimdown.rb to set the path to your pages.

Slimdown.config do |c|
  c.location = Rails.root.join('lib/pages')
end

Testing

Testing using a controller spec is not possible because you are testing for an arbitrary url. You can do a feature test with Capybara or friends. However, given that you are just returning content, you can use a request spec. For example, you have an about.md in your remote repo or lib/pages then in your spec/requests/slimdown_request_spec.rb. Additionally, you can override the page path for the test, allowing you to use a fixture directory.

RSpec.describe "Static Pages", type: :request do
  before :each do
    Slimdown.config do |c|
      c.location = Rails.root.join '/spec/fixtures/test_pages'
    end
  end

  describe "GET /" do
    it "#show" do
      get "/about"
      expect(response).to render_template(:show)
      expect(response.status).to be(200)
    end
  end
end

General notes

The use case for us is that we have a distinct repo containing the markdown (and some other files) which is editable by producers. This is autodeployed to a location on our servers which is accessible from our Rails app.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release to create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/apmg/ruby-slimdown/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request