Plain Record

Plaint Record is a data persistence, which use human editable and readable plain text files. It’s ideal for static generated sites, like blog or homepage.

If you want to write another static website generator, you don’t need to write another file parser – you can use Plain Record.

For example we will create simple blog storage with posts and comments.

1. Add Plain Record to your application Gemfile:

   gem "plain_record"

2. Set storage root – dir, which will contain all data files:

   PlainRecord.root = 'data/'

3. Create Post class, include Plain::Resource module, set glob pattern to posts files and define fields:

   class Post
    include Plain::Resource
   
    entry_in '*/post.md'
   
    virtual :name,     in_filepath(1)
    virtual :comments, many(Comment)
    field   :title     default("Untitled")
    field   :tags      default([])
    field   :created   type(Time)
    text    :summary
    text    :content
   end

4. Create new post file data/first/post.md. Fields will be saved as YAML and text will be placed as plain text, which is separated by 3 dashes:

   title: My first post
   tags: test, first
   ---
   It is short post summary.
   ---
   And this is big big post text.
   In several lines.
   

5. Also you can use files with list of entries. For example, comments:

   class Comment
    include Plain::Resource
   
    list_in '*/comments.yml'
   
    virtual :post_name, in_filepath(1)
    virtual :post,      one(Post)
    field   :author
    field   :comment
   end

   You can’t use text fields in list files.

6. List files is a just YAML array. For example, data/first/comments.yml:

   \- author: Anonymous
      comment: I like it!
   \- author: Friend
      comment: You first post it shit.

7. Get all post:

   Post.all # will return array with our first post

8. Get specific entries:

   Comment.all(author: 'Anonymous')
   Post.all(title: /first/)
   Post.all { |i| i.tags.length == 2 }

9. To get one entry use first method, which also can take matchers. You can access for fields and text by methods with same name:

   post = Post.first(title: /first/)
   post.file    #=> "data/first/post.md"
   post.name    #=> "first"
   post.title   #=> "My first post"
   post.tags    #=> ["test", "first"]
   post.summary #=> "It is short post summary."

10. You can also change and save entries:

    post.title = 'First post'
    post.save

11. And delete it (with empty dirs in it file path):

    post.destroy

Plain Record is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License version 3. See the LICENSE file or http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html.

Andrey “A.I.” Sitnik andrey@sitnik.ru