Serving your website

PieCrust includes a small development web server for previewing your website. Since PieCrust also works as a standard, lightweight CMS, you could preview your website with any other web server like Apache, IIS or Lighttpd. Here are some advantages to using the development server:

• No setup or configuration needed, you just run it from the command line!
• If you’re baking your site, you don’t need to maintain an index.php file, along with a .htaccess or web.config, that you then need to exclude from the baking.
• If you’re baking your site and rely on file processors, the development server can re-bake your website on-demand to generate those output files. With another server, you would get 404 (“not found”) errors unless you somehow write your own request handlers to trigger a baking.

Here are the disadvantages:

• The development server uses the StupidHttp library, which is pretty retarded (we know, we wrote it ourselves!). It has a very limited support of the HTTP protocol so it will only work with the purely PieCrust-powered parts of your website (e.g. if you have other parts of your website that work with custom PHP files, you won’t be able to test that in the development server).
• Although there’s a plan to fix that in the future, right now the development server can’t run file processors. This means that if you’re using things like Sass, you may not be able to preview your website correctly.

Running the server

The server is run through chef with the serve command. Type chef serve --help for a detailed usage.

In the most simple case, serving your website is done with a quick chef serve, assuming you’re somewhere in your website. This would launch your default browser and navigate to localhost:8080, where your website can be previewed.