Xelif

Xelif is the decommissioned content management system (CMS) that powered the Felix website from October 2020 to October 2024.

Tip

Take a look at a snapshot of the website on its last day of being powered by Xelif.

It is a custom-built solution based on Twill, which is itself based on Laravel. Designed for the traditional LAMP stack and later migrated to Docker, it is largely written in PHP and uses a MySQL database to store articles and other site data.

It supersedes the previous edition of the website, which was statically generated using Hugo.

File layout

/app: “Backend” logic, like models (/app/Models) and controllers (/app/Http/Controllers). Controllers for pages in the admin dashboard are under /app/Http/Controllers/Admin. Controllers for user-visible pages are directly under /app/Http/Controllers

/resources/views: Frontend view templates, written in Blade

/resources/views/layouts: Whole webpages

/resources/views/blocks: How blocks are rendered, each should correspond to a block form in the editor.

/resource/views/components: Components that may appear multiple time in multiple pages, such as the byline.

/resource/views/admin: Form definitions for the admin backend. You should also put fully custom admin pages here.

/public: Static files visible to the public. Don't put any secrets here!

/public/assets/pub/css/main.css: The one stylesheet for the entire site. Though isolated CSS for specific compon ents should be put in *.blade.php instead (utilising @once with @push)

/routes/web.php: User-facing routes, directing URL patterns to a method (usually called show) of a controller.

/routes/admin.php: Admin backend routes. They also need to be defined in /config/twill-navigation.php to show up on the toolbar.

Setup

Requirements

• PHP
• Composer
• MySQL

The repo include a VSCode development container config with all of this preinstall, so you may wish to use this. (note: always use localhost to access the website; VSCode defaults to 127.0.0.1 when opening the site browser when it detects it is running, which does not work)

Setting up a development environment

1. In MySQL, create a database schema called laravel by CREATE SCHEMA `laravel` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8
2. Run composer install under repository root
3. Copy .env.example into a new file called .env
4. Run php artisan key:generate
5. In .env, set DB_USERNAME and DB_PASSWORD to the credentials of the MySQL account
6. Run php artisan twill:install and set up the admin account
7. Run php artisan db:seed --class=SeedInDev to populate the DB with default settings, "News" and "About" sections, plus an empty issue so you can see the homepage (NOTE: settings are as of 21/12/22, they may change since they include website styling so don't use these to recreate production!)
8. Run php artisan storage:link to set up local media storage
9. Start up a development server via php artisan serve

Required PHP extensions (incomplete)

(On Windows, uncomment extension_dir = "ext")

• mbstring
• pdo_mysql (or pdo_pgsql if using postgres)
• fileinfo

Database configuration

If recreating the database, open up MySQL CLI, then

CREATE USER xelif@localhost IDENTIFIED BY '[password]';
CREATE SCHEMA laravel DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON laravel.* TO xelif@localhost;

Log rotation

Laravel will write all its logs to storage/logs/laravel.log. You should check this file whenever you need to debug a server error.

However this file will get larger and larger. We should setup a logrotate rule to manage it.

sudoedit /etc/logrotate.d/xelif

/var/www/felixonline.co.uk/storage/logs/laravel.log {
        daily
        missingok
        rotate 14
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty
        create 0644 www-data www-data
        postrotate
                systemctl reload apache2
        endscript
}