breakdown

breakdown is a lightweight Python webserver that parses Jinja2 templates. It's intended to be used by designers for doing rapid prototyping.

Basic Usage

Breakdown needs a templates directory and a static directory to serve from. If your working directory contains these, you can simply run breakdown with no arguments:

 breakdown

Or, you can specify the path to a directory containing templates and static:

 breakdown /path/to/project

Breakdown will also work with a django project structure. If the project path contains an apps directory, breakdown will automatically detect this and combine the static and templates directories for each django app. You'll also get a listing of the directories it found. Here's the output of running breakdown on a django project with two apps: 'mainsite' and 'blog':

 breakdown ~/django/myproject
Serving templates from:
 /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/templates
 /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/templates

Serving static data from:
 /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/static
 /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/static

Viewing Templates

Once breakdown is running, it will print the local URL the webserver is listening on:

Server running at http://127.0.0.1:5000 ...

You can now view templates in your browser by navigating to http://127.0.0.1:5000. However, you won't see anything here unless one of your template directories contains a file named index.html. The URL of any template (besides index.html) will be identical to its filename, with all relative paths preserved. Below is an example of template filenames and their corresponding URL on the local server:

Template URL
index.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/
article.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/article
blog/index.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog
blog/post.html http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/post

Note: The server will accept template URLs with or without .html appended to them

Additional Features

Template tags

For convenience, A few template functions have been added to the jinja2 template API:

{{ greeking() }}

Generates a block of randomized lorem ipsum text marked-up with various HTML elements: < em >, < strong >, < code >, < a >, < ol >, and < ul >.

{{ image(width, height) }}

If you have PIL installed, you can use this function to generate an tag with a sample image of the specified size (without PIL, the width/height are ignored and you get a large sample image)

CleverCSS

Breakdown also supports automatic CleverCSS parsing. If the file foo.css is requested and not found, breakdown will then look for a matching foo.clevercss and compile it to vanilla css on the fly.

Advanced

Command line options:
 -h, --help show this help message and exit
 -p PORT, --port=PORT
 run server on an alternate port (default is 5000)
 -m, --media treat MEDIA_URL as STATIC_URL in templates
 -v, --version display the version number and exit

Requirements:

• Python