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.

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

Getting Canvas up and running is simple. You can choose either of the following installation options:

Option 1 - Use Composer:

composer create-project austintoddj/canvas

Option 2 - Download the repository:

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

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

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

Generate a key for your application:

php artisan key:generate

Open up Canvas/config/blog.php and define a few configuration options for your blog.

Note: The 'title' of your blog is used as the domain to create the default user email.

When you first set up Canvas, you may want to change the default user information right away. To update user information including setting a new password (Recommended), edit the file Canvas/database/seeds/UsersTableSeeder.php and save it. Make sure to re-run migrations and seeds if you have already run them.

Run the database migrations:

php artisan migrate --seed

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

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.

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.

Detailed changes for each release are documented in the release notes.

Canvas is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.