Topaz

Topaz is a WIP blog engine built with PHP 7.

Requirements

Topaz requires the following:

• PHP 7.4
• PHP DOM extension (some distros call this php-xml or something similar)
• PHP mbstring extension
• A MySQL/MariaDB database
• The TypeScript compiler (tsc)
• A SASS compiler

Building

To build, first ensure that the tsc and sass programs are available in your environment. Then, simply run ./build.sh in the root directory of the repository. An archive will be generated in build/ containing the root file structure of the website. This archive can be extracted to the document root of the web server/virtual host.

Configuration

Web Server Configuration

Topaz requires that a configuration file in JSON format be present in order to run. The path to this file must be specified by the TOPAZ_CONFIG environment variable. A sample config file can be found in the res directory of this repository.

To set the config environment variable in Apache:

<VirtualHost>
    ...
    SetEnv TOPAZ_CONFIG /path/to/topaz_config.json
    ...
</VirtualHost>

Additionally, your web server should be configured to deny access to the _internal directory. To do this in Apache 2.4:

<VirtualHost>
    ...
    <Directory /path/to/document_root/_internal/>
        Require all denied
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    ...
</VirtualHost>

Database Configuration

Finally, you must initialize the database for use with Topaz. Create a new database (the name doesn't matter) and run the full.sql script located in the res/database directory of this repository. This script will initialize all tables required by Topaz. Future updates may alter the database structure, in which case patch scripts will be added to the same directory.

Developing

For convenience, a watch.sh script has been provided in the root of the repository. This script will run continuously and compile TypeScript and SCSS sources automatically. Note that this script will not create a distribution archive, and is restricted to compiling these sources.

Planned Features

Below is a non-exhaustive list of features I would like to implement in Topaz. This list may change with time and not all listed features will necessarily be implemented.

• Persistent user session cookies
• Cross-request config caching
• On-demand registration token generation
• User management console
• Categories / category management page

License

Topaz is made available under the MIT License. You may use the provided software within its bounds.

The images in the /images/sample/ directory of this repository are non-original works which exist in the public domain. Topaz's license does not apply to these files.