I know I'm gonna get shit for not using an autoconf-based system, but -I really didn't want to spend time figuring it out. You should edit -libs.mk and put in the paths where you can find headers and libraries -for the above requirements. +
There is now an experimental autoconf build system. If you run
+add-autoconf, it'll do the magic and create a
+configure script that'll do the familiar things. If I ever
+get around to distributing source packages, you should find that this
+has already been done.
+
+
If you'd rather stick with the manual system, you should edit libs.mk +and put in the paths where you can find headers and libraries for the +above requirements.
Also, further apologies to BSD folks — I've probably committed
several unconscious Linux-isms. It would not surprise me if the
@@ -101,6 +119,9 @@ made individually as well, if you, for example, don't want to install
the prerequisites for blerg.httpd or
blerg.cgi.
+
NOTE: blerg.httpd is deprecated and will not be +updated with new features. +
While it's not strictly required, Blërg will be easier to set up if
@@ -109,26 +130,17 @@ reason, it's better to use a subdomain (i.e., blerg.yoursite.com is
easier than yoursite.com/blerg/). If you do want to put it in a
subdirectory, you will have to modify www/js/blerg.js and
change baseURL at the top as well as a number of other self-references
-in that file and www/index.html. The CGI version should
-work fine this way, but the HTTP version will require the request to be
-rewritten, as it expects to be serving from the root.
+in that file and www/index.html.
You cannot serve the database and client from different domains (i.e., yoursite.com vs othersite.net, or even foo.yoursite.com and bar.yoursite.com). This is a requirement of the web browser — the same origin policy will not allow an AJAX request to travel across -domains. +domains (though you can probably get around it these days with Cross-origin + resource sharing). -
Right now, blerg.httpd doesn't serve any static assets,
-so you're going to have to put it behind a real webserver like apache,
-lighttpd, nginx, or similar. Set the document root to the www
-directory, then proxy /info, /create, /login, /logout, /get, /tag, and
-/put to blerg.httpd. You can change the port blerg.httpd
-listens on in config.h.
-
-
Copy the files in www/ to the root of your web server. Copy
blerg.cgi to your web server. Included in www-configs/ is
@@ -136,10 +148,47 @@ a .htaccess file for Apache that will rewrite the URLs. If you need to
call the CGI something other than blerg.cgi, the .htaccess
file will need to be modified.
+
Nginx can't run CGI directly, and there's currently no FastCGI +version of Blërg, so you will have to run it under some kind of CGI to +FastCGI gateway, like the one described here on the nginx wiki. This +pretty much destroys the performance of Blërg, but it's all we've got +right now. +
There is an optional RSS cgi (rss.cgi) that will serve
RSS feeds for users. Install this like blerg.cgi above.
+As of 1.9.0, this is a perl FastCGI script, so you will have to make
+sure the perl libraries are available to it. A good way of doing that
+is to install to an environment directory, as described below.
+
+
The Makefile has support for installing Blërg into a directory that
+includes tools, libraries, and configuration snippets for shell and web
+servers. Use it as make install-environment
+ ENV_DIR=<directory>. Under <directory>/etc will be
+a shell script that sets environment variables, and configuration
+snippets for nginx and apache to do the same. This should make it
+somewhat easier to use Blërg in a self-contained way.
+
+
For example, this will install Blërg to an environment directory +inside your home directory: + +
user@devhost:~/blerg$ make install-environment ENV_DIR=$HOME/blerg-env +... +user@devhost:~/blerg$ . ~/blerg-env/etc/env.sh ++ +
Then, you will be able to run tools like blergtool, and
+it will operate on data inside ~/blerg-env/data. Likewise,
+you can include
+/home/user/blerg-env/etc/nginx-fastcgi-vars.conf or
+/home/user/blerg-env/etc/apache-setenv.conf in your
+webserver to make the CGI/FastCGI scripts to the same thing.
author field, like so:
There is currently no support for getting more than 50 tags, but /tag will probably mutate to work like /get. +
POST to /subscribe/(user) with a username parameter and
+an auth cookie, where (user) is the user whose updates you wish to
+subscribe to. The server will respond with JSON failure if the auth
+cookie is bad or if the user doesn't exist. The server will respond
+with JSON success after the subscription is successfully registered.
+
+
Identical to /subscribe, but removes the subscription. + +
POST to /feed, with a username parameter and an auth
+cookie. The server will respond with a JSON list of the last 50 updates
+from all subscribed users, in reverse chronological order. Fetching
+/feed resets the new message count returned from /feedinfo.
+
+
NOTE: subscription notifications are only stored while subscriptions +are active. Any records inserted before or after a subscription is +active will not show up in /feed. + +
POST to /feedinfo with a username parameter and an auth
+cookie to get general information about your subscribed feeds.
+Currently, this only tells you how many new records there are since the
+last time /feed was fetched. The server will respond with a JSON
+object:
+
+
+{"new":3}
+
+
+POST to /feedinfo/(user) with a username parameter and
+an auth cookie, where (user) is a user whose subscription status you are
+interested in. The server will respond with a simple JSON object:
+
+
+{"subscribed":true}
+
+
+The value of "subscribed" will be either true or false depending on +the subscription status. + +
POST to /passwd with a username parameter and an auth
+cookie, plus password and new_password
+parameters to change the user's password. For extra protection,
+changing a password requires sending the user's current password in the
+password parameter. If authentication is successful and
+the password matches, the user's password is set to
+new_password and the server responds with JSON success.
+
+If the password doesn't match, or one of password or
+new_password are missing, the server returns JSON failure.
+
+
Most of Blërg's core functionality is packaged in a static library
+called blerg.a. It's not designed to be public or
+installed with `make install-environment`, but it should be relatively
+straightforward to use it in C programs. Look at the headers under the
+databse directory.
+
+
A secondary library called blerg_auth.a handles the
+authentication layer of Blërg. To use it, look at
+common/auth.h.
+
+
As of 1.9.0, Blërg includes a perl library called
+Blerg::Database. It wraps the core and authentication
+functionality in a perlish interface. The module has its own POD
+documentation, which you can read with your favorite POD reader, from
+the manual installed in an environment directory, or in HTML here.
+
Blërg does both by smashing the last two or three layers into one -application. Blërg can be run as either a standalone web server, or as -a CGI (FastCGI support is planned, but I just don't care right now). -Less waste, more throughput. As a consequence of this, the entirety of -the application logic that the user sees is implemented in the client -app in Javascript. That's why all the URLs have #'s — the page is -loaded once and switched on the fly to show different views, further -reducing load on the server. Even parsing hash tags and URLs are done -in client JS. +application. Blërg can be run as either a standalone web server +(currently deprecated because maintaining two versions is hard), or as a +CGI (FastCGI support is planned, but I just don't care right now). Less +waste, more throughput. As a consequence of this, the entirety of the +application logic that the user sees is implemented in the client app in +Javascript. That's why all the URLs have #'s — the page is loaded +once and switched on the fly to show different views, further reducing +load on the server. Even parsing hash tags and URLs are done in client +JS.
The API is simple and pragmatic. It's not entirely RESTful, but is rather designed to work well with web-based front-ends. Client data is @@ -364,24 +499,24 @@ early in the design process that I'd try out mmaped I/O. Each user in Blërg has their own database, which consists of a metdata file, and one or more data and index files. The data and index files are memory mapped, which hopefully makes things more efficient by letting the OS -handle when to read from disk (or maybe not &mdash I haven't benchmarked -it). The index files are preallocated because I believe it's more -efficient than writing to it 40 bytes at a time as records are added. -The database's limits are reasonable: +handle when to read from disk (or maybe not — I haven't +benchmarked it). The index files are preallocated because I believe +it's more efficient than writing to it 40 bytes at a time as records are +added. The database's limits are reasonable:
| maximum record size | 65535 bytes |
| maximum number of records per database | 264 - 1 bytes |
| maximum number of records per database | 264 - 1 |
| maximum number of tags per record | 1024 |