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.
Thanks to Tim Anglade, there's a nice script that watches all the source files for changes and compiles them automatically.
gem install compass maruku sprockets fssm yui-compressor
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.
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.
Proceed to the tutorial.