Ecrire

Ecrire is a blog built on top of Ruby on Rails. The goal of this blog engine is to make it easy to start a blog while keeping control over the content. You can see this as an alternative to WordPress.

The editor

The editor was built around the Markdown syntax. The content change as you type to offer you a very good approximation of how your post will look like once publish.

Here's the available feature:

  • Headers
  • Unordered list
  • Ordered list
  • Code with syntax highlighting
  • Image with auto-upload to S3
  • Links
  • Bold and Italic words

More feature will be implemented as the Editor mature.

Theme

When you start a new blog with Ecrire, it will generate a folder for you. Everything in that folder is for you to modify. You won't break anything. It also features a few characteristic that you may recognize if you are a Rails developer.

  • SASS
  • Coffeescript
  • Assets caching through Sprockets
  • View using layouts, views and partials
  • Controllers
  • Helpers
  • Static pages

When you install your theme, the documentation will be available direclty within your blog so you can go back to it when you need it.

How to install

$ gem install ecrire
$ ecrire new my.blog.com
$ cd my.blog.com/
$ ecrire server

From there, you can access your new blog via the browser and start configuring your database.

Heroku

Once you have finished your changes in your local environment, here's how you can publish your blog on Heroku.

$ heroku git:remote -a name-of-your-app-on-heroku
$ git push origin heroku
$ heroku run rake db:migrate

Your blog is now up and running on Heroku! But you need to create a user on Heroku for now, here's how you do it.

$ heroku run ecrire console
irb(main)> user = User.new
irb(main)> user.email = "[email protected]"
irb(main)> user.password = "yourpassword"
irb(main)> user.save!
irb(main)> exit

You can now log in to your blog in production and start writing for real!