Brochure is a Rack application for serving static sites with ERB templates (or any of the many template languages supported by Tilt). It's the good parts of PHP wrapped up in a little Ruby package — perfect for serving the marketing site for your Rails app.

Sample application structure:

templates/
  help/
    index.html.erb
  index.html.erb
  shared/
    _header.html.erb
    _footer.html.erb
  signup.html.erb
config.ru
public/
  ...

Sample config.ru:

require "brochure"
root = File.dirname(__FILE__)
run Brochure.app(root)

URLs are automatically mapped to template names:

• / → templates/index.html.erb
• /signup → templates/signup.html.erb
• /help/ → templates/help/index.html.erb

Templates can render partials. A partial is denoted by a leading underscore in its filename. So <%= render "shared/header" %> will render templates/shared/_header.html.erb inline.

Partials can <%= yield %> back to the templates that render them. You can use this technique to extract common header and footer markup into a single layout file, for example.

Templates have access to the Rack environment via the env method and to the Brochure application via the application method. Additionally, a Rack::Request wrapper around the Rack environment is available via the request method.

You can print HTML-escaped strings in your templates with the h helper.

You can make additional helper methods and instance variables available to your templates. Helper methods live in Ruby modules and can be included with the :helpers option to Brochure.app:

module AssetHelper
  def asset_path(filename)
    local_path = File.join(application.asset_root, filename)
    digest = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(IO.read(local_path))
    "/#{filename}?#{digest}"
  end
end

run Brochure.app(root, :helpers => [AssetHelper])

Similarly, instance variables can be defined with the :assigns option:

run Brochure.app(root, :assigns => { :domain => "37signals.com" })

You can specify global Tilt template options on a per-engine basis with :template_options:

run Brochure.app(root, :template_options => {
  ".haml" => { :format => :html5 },
  ".md"   => { :smart  => true }
})

$ gem install brochure

Requires Hike, Rack, and Tilt.

Copyright (c) 2010 Sam Stephenson and Josh Peek.

Released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.