Introducing Serve: Now With Gemmi Goodness!

Posted by John on September 25th, 2007

Based on my HAML Server for Web Designers article, I’ve created a small gem “serve” which makes it extremely easy for a Web Designer to get up and running with Haml and Sass:

$ sudo gem install haml redcloth bluecloth serve
$ cd ~/Workspaces/prototype
$ ls . * 
.:
index.haml

images:
logo.gif

javascripts:
prototype.js        dialogs.js         tabset.js

stylesheets:
application.sass        dialogs.sass
$ serve
[2007-09-25 02:11:42] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2007-09-25 02:11:42] INFO  ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25)
[2007-09-25 02:11:42] INFO  Serve::Server#start: pid=1626 port=3000
...

And voila! I can now access the files in ~/Workspaces/prototype at:

http://localhost:3000

Serve isn’t just a HAML or SASS server. With the proper gems it can also handle Textile and Markdown (not to mention plain Jane HTML!).

Serve also plays nicely with Rails. If you have a file named “script/server” in the current directory, Serve will execute that script instead of launching the normal WEBrick server.

Complete usage information is available with:

$ serve --help

Learn more about the project over at Ruby Forge…