Posts tagged with "SmolServe"

Currently, I'm working on adding support for the Nex Protocol to Rogallo. Having Port1900 as the client library, and having done the bulk of the work in Rogallo, I needed things in place to be able to add some nex://-related documentation too -- which is where SmolServe comes in.

So I've dropped v1.1.0 on PyPI, which adds support for running up a simple just-good-enough Nex server (although, to be fair, Nex is so simple this is probably a fully capable one just by the very nature of how trivial the protocol is).

Now to get back to polishing that Rogallo PR...

As Rogallo got close to being "stable", I did a fair bit of work on its documentation. Something that I wanted to include in the site was a good collection of up-to-date screenshots. These are all created on the fly. To do this, of course, requires something that looks like a Gemini server.

Initially, this was simple: Rogallo only supported Gemini capsules, so I could illustrate most things just using Gemtext files in the local filesystem (with an admonition in the documentation to point out that Rogallo was for more than viewing local files). This, of course, wasn't going to scale when I added Finger support, and neither was it going to work well for Gopher support.

The solution seemed obvious: use a lightweight local server for these protocols. With this need in place SmolServe was born. As mentioned when I released Rogallo v1.5.0, this isn't a project to build a comprehensive smolweb server. The aim is to build myself a minimal just-good-enough server that helps me with local testing and documentation.

As it stands, SmolServe supports Gemini, Gopher, Finger and Spartan. Or, rather, it supports a just-enough-to-get-by version of each of those protocols. None are implemented in a way that would serve as a "production" server; they're implemented to allow me to generate screenshots for the Rogallo documentation, involving any of the supported protocols, without the need to rely on services I don't control and which aren't local.

The big benefit of SmolServe is the exec support. With this, you can run up the server and then have it run another command. Once that command finishes its work, SmolServe will close down too. This means that, when it comes to producing the Rogallo documentation, I can just have the server running when I need it. Pulling some snippets from the Rogallo Makefile:

run      := uv run
smol     := $(run) smolserve --config $(docs)server/smolserve.toml
smolexec := $(smol) exec --
mkdocs   := $(smolexec) mkdocs

##############################################################################
# Documentation.
.PHONY: docs
docs:
    $(mkdocs) build

.PHONY: rtfm
rtfm:
    $(mkdocs) serve --livereload

.PHONY: publishdocs
publishdocs: clean-docs
    $(mkdocs) gh-deploy

The idea is that, when I build the documentation, I actually run smolserve, which in turn runs mkdocs, which then produces the documentation while the local server is available.

I also use this sort of approach for local testing of the content of my capsule that lives over on tilde.team.

.PHONY: view
view:
    uv run smolserve --config smolserve.toml exec rogallo open gemini://localhost/

My aim now is that, if I add any other protocols to Rogallo, I'll add a just-good-enough version of them to SmolServe to help me with testing and documentation. For the moment, though, I think it's in a stable and usable state.

After a short break to do some fossil hunting, I'm back tinkering with Rogallo. The main change in v1.5.0 is the addition of support for custom themes.

Before I get to that though, there's a small number of other fixes, additions and tweaks. The first is a small change to the Gopher support. As of this version, if there's a type 8 item in a Gopher menu, it will now be turned into a telnet:// URI rather than being left as a gopher:// URI. This should help in handing off such an item to the correct application in your environment.

I've also added a new command: PipeDocument. This is bound to Ctrl+Shift+p by default. If you're viewing a document and run this command, you'll be prompted for a shell command that the source of the document will be piped through. This could be useful for transforming the source and passing it on elsewhere. For example:

One small fix in this release is the correction of a typo in the code that resulted in a misspelled item in the configuration file. The bookmarks_visble configuration setting has been changed to bookmarks_visible (the spelling of visible was wrong). Technically this is a breaking change but, because the impact is almost zero, I'm running with it. The worst possible outcome after installing v1.5.0 is that the bookmarks aren't showing in the sidebar when they were before; calling them back up will fix the issue.

Now on to the main change: custom themes. Rogallo has always had theme support, and the themes that were made available were most of the themes built into Textual. There was a request to be able to create additional themes, and so, here's that feature. Using this, if you want to have Rogallo look just so, you can now follow the documentation, or look over the examples, and have a play. So if you fancied a version of Rogallo that looked like it was running on a good old green terminal:

Or perhaps an amber terminal is more your thing?

Maybe you hanker after the days of MS-DOS and those Turbo IDEs?

Even better: perhaps the CBM64 was your thing back in the day?

Note that none of these themes are part of Rogallo itself, and don't ship with it; they're just examples of what you could do if you wished. I don't even offer them as good examples of what you could do (for example: I can see that I've managed to end up with the jump labels being far too dim to be readable). I'm sure other people with more talent for design than I have will be able to do far better. If anyone wants to make their own themes and share them, I've created a spot just for that.

One last thing: while it's not a feature of this version of Rogallo, I've also done some work on the site to try and add a little more detail about using Rogallo. This process will be ongoing. The main additions here are some background on the supported protocols and some help on the key UI elements.

The documentation is also greatly improved with better examples thanks to smolserve -- this is a little helper project I've been tinkering with. Note that this is not and will never be intended to be an actual small web server; it is and always will be a tool to help development and to support the production of Rogallo's documentation.