Canvas is a minimal blogging application for developers. It attempts to make blogging simple and enjoyable by utilizing the latest technologies and keeping the administration as simple as possible with the primary focus on writing.
Requirements
Since Canvas is built on Laravel 5.2, there are a few system requirements:
- PHP >= 5.5.9
- OpenSSL PHP Extension
- PDO PHP Extension
- PDO compliant database (SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)
- Mbstring PHP Extension
- Tokenizer PHP Extension
Download
Getting Canvas up and running is simple. You can choose either of the following download options:
Option 1 - Use Packagist:
composer create-project austintoddj/canvas
Option 2 - Use GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/austintoddj/canvas.git
If you chose Option 1, skip this step. If you chose Option 2, run the following command from the project root:
composer install
Make sure to modify the permissions of the storage directory:
sudo chmod o+w -R storage
To enable uploads on the site, give ownership of the uploads directory to the web server:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data public/uploads
Configuring Canvas
You will need to create a new .env
file and fill in the necessary variables:
cat .env.example > .env; vim .env;
Admin User Setup
Data Key | Value |
---|---|
Login Email | admin@canvas.com (default) |
Login Password | password (default) |
When you download Canvas, you may want to change the default admin user credentials. To update admin user information including setting a new password (Recommended), edit the file Canvas/database/seeds/UsersTableSeeder.php
and save it. Don't worry, you can always change this information within the application after the install process.
The 30 Second Canvas Installation
Installing Canvas is really simple. Just run php artisan canvas:install
and follow the on-screen prompts.
Theming Canvas
Adding or modifying styles with Canvas is a breeze. None of this needs to be done out of the box, it simply works on its own. But if you're feeling a little creative and want to make it stand out more, follow these steps:
Install the project dependencies via npm
:
sudo npm install
Install Gulp globally:
sudo npm install --global gulp-cli
After you make any modifications to the files in Canvas/resources/assets/less/
, run gulp:
gulp
Unit Testing
This section is optional. If you do not want to run unit tests on your application and just want to get straight to blogging, that's completely up to you. If you do choose to utilize the test suite bundled with Canvas, you will need to have the PHP extension SQLite installed on your server. The unit tests are run against memory so you can safely test your application without affecting real data.
Disqus Comments
To enable Disqus comments on your blog, you need to have a unique shortname. For more information, check out the Official Documentation.
Once you have registered your site and have a shortname, use it to set the DISQUS_NAME
key in your .env
file.
Changelog
Detailed changes for each release are documented in the release notes.
License
Canvas is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.