Keep it in one file¶ ↑

Generally, the idea is keep your app small and store in a single file. Your app will end up with four sections:

1. Camping setup

do
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'camping'
  Camping.goes :Blog
end

1. Models

do
  module Blog::Models
    class User < Base; end
    class Post < Base; belongs_to :user end
  end
end

1. Controllers

do
  module Blog::Controllers
    class Index < R '/'
      def get; render :index end
    end
  end
end

1. Views

do
  module Blog::Views
    def layout
      html { body { self << yield } }
    end
    def index
      div.page "Welcome!"
    end
  end
end

What if things get out of hand?¶ ↑

If you’re piling up models and controllers, your file may begin to exceed 200 lines, which means lots of paging up and down. Go ahead and store your models, controllers and views in three separate files. Your directory structure should end up like this:

blog.rb
blog/
  models.rb
  controllers.rb
  views.rb

(Note, for the development reloading to work, your required files (models.rb etc.) must be in a subdirectory named after your app.)

Your blog.rb would still contain the setup (No. 1):

do
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'camping'
  Camping.goes :Blog
  require 'blog/helpers'  # if needed
  require 'blog/models'
  require 'blog/views'
  require 'blog/controllers'
end

Small apps, many mounts¶ ↑

Rather than building huge Camping apps, the idea here is to write small apps which can each be mounted at directories on your web server. One restriction: these apps will share a database. However, this allows applications to access each other’s tables and simplifies setup and configuration.

To mount multiple camping apps, you can require the app files. When you mount more than one app they won’t be mounted according to their parent directory, routing is explicit. If you’d like to give one of your apps a prefix, set the url_prefix option in your app:

# camp.rb
require 'camping'
Camping.goes :Blog
require 'blog.rb'

Camping.goes :Wiki
require 'wiki.rb'
Wiki.set :url_prefix, 'tepee/'

Camping.goes :Charty
require 'charty.rb'
Charty.set :url_prefix, 'charts/'

By default Camping will look for a file called camp.rb in the root where Camping is executed. You can also supply a ruby filename to load your apps from there.

You’ll end up with:

http://localhost:3301/blog, a blogging app.
http://localhost:3301/tepee, a wiki app.
http://localhost:3301/charts, a charting app.

In your app, if you’re using the R() method to build your links, Camping will make sure the mount is added properly to links.

For example, if R(View, 1) is used in the blogging app mounted at /blog, the link will be written as /blog/view/1. If later you mount the blog at /articles instead, Camping will write the link as /articles/view/1.

Give us a create method¶ ↑

do
  def Blog.create
    # Code in here will run when the app starts, or reloads, but not when requests happen.
    # You can use it to create database bits and pieces, files, folders, and so on.
  end
end

The camping server¶ ↑

The Camping Server is basically a set of rules. At the very least, The Camping Server must:

• Load all Camping apps in a directory.

• Load new apps that appear in that directory.

• Mount those apps according to their filename. (e.g. blog.rb is mounted at /blog.)

• Run each app’s create method upon startup.

• Reload the app if its modification time changes.

• Reload the app if it requires any files under the same directory and one of their modification times changes.

• Support the X-Sendfile header.

Bin/camping¶ ↑

Camping comes with a very simple version of The Camping Server. bin/camping uses either WEBrick or Mongrel (if you have it installed.)

Run it like this: camping /var/www/camping/*. It will follow all of the rules above.