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.

Basic Setup

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

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

Application Configuration

You will need to create a new .env file and fill in the necessary variables:

cat .env.example > .env; vim .env;

User Configuration

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.

Search Indexing

Search functionality in Canvas is provided by TNTSearch.

To build the index, simply run php artisan canvas:index.

After you run the command, you just need to set the permissions of the storage directory:

sudo chmod o+w -R storage

Congratulations! Your new blog is set up and ready to go. Feeling adventurous? Continue on with the advanced options below to get even more out of Canvas.

Advanced Options

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.

zarincheg / Canvas