Adds usable contact/subscription/unsubscription forms for your hosting sites with Hostfurl.

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Promote developer UX (user experience) escape hatches to frustrating static web site development. Allow simple forms to email.

See The Conditions the Developer UX Philosophy Escapes From

The magic that makes for a great UX (user experience) is CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment or Delivery) with web pages written in Markdown.

The sole change for a Hostfurl shell for CI/CD to work is the insertion of a one line public key in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Hostfurl is aware for customers to set up CI/CD independent of their hosting provider is a frustrating experience that requires a lot of experience.

While Hostfurl has developed software than can provision CI/CD for individual customers, this CI/CD provisioning software is not ready yet to be integrated into the billing system and server hosting sofTware.

The intention is to make it the CI/CD provisioning software flexible enough to stand alone at an admin level and allow as little surface level as necessary to integrate with the billing system and server hosting software.

In the meantime, Hostfurl customer are welcome to request their hosting site be integrate into through https://my.hostfurl.com on a free trial basis for CMS CI/CD purposes only.

If you migrate this repository to a Forgejo Git server then it will attempt to start a Forgejo Action. Public examples of Forgejo servers are https://codeberg.org/ and https://codefloe.com/

There is a mechanism to place in place to stop the Forgejo Action early. Forgejo Actions should be disabled following migration until further setup.

There is an example of this template in use at https://minformhf.hostfurl.com. There is an example of the base template in use at https://minform.hostfurl.com.

To edit site and upload changes:

• Clone repository or download a release
• npm install
• npm start
• Browse to link
• If using CMS CI/CD, please see .env.sample and make sure any .env file is included in .gitignore. While the information is not really secret, it is good practice and will avoid getting automated warnings.
• Edit site as you wish
• The site footer can be edited in _data/site.yml
• Hostfurl hosting does not support cors, so testing forms without uploading changes will not work
• Upload changes to your site with rsync, specific example to be provided

• npm update --save updates packages

Basically node/npm for a non root user with sh or symbolic link from sh, pre-installed.

If you have command interpreter sh in $PATH, then the npm run script will use this for POSIX shell operations.

What is required is a POSIX compliant shell and file system for use with npm run that includes support for ln and rm.

So, any desktop/laptop/server OS with a Linux, BSD or UNIX like kernel, including macOS; Windows with WSL; any mobile or tablet OS with app which supports a POSIX compliant shell; any embedded system with BusyBox.

Just about any system with curl and sh can install node/npm, as shown below.

What is not supported is Windows using cmd for npm run. Install WSL if using Windows.

It is expected to use rsync for uploading files. Normally this is pre installed.

While git is not required, it is expected for advanced use.

Never install and run node/npm for user root. This may not be practical for embedded systems.

There are a variety of methods supported by OS distributions and version software.

A cross platform, OS independent, method to install up to date node/npm is to use curl and sh such as documented at Download Node.js®, which downloads and installs node with npm bundled.

Termux emulates a Debian distribution on Android. A standard installation of a desktop or server OS will include prerequisites such as curl and git.

With a fresh Termux installation on Android:

pkg update
pkg upgrade
pkg install curl git -y

Either use

pkg install nodejs-lts -y

or, to help keep more up to date versions of node/npm, use Download Node.js®

Please see Minform Technical Details

The Hostfurl shell and a separate open-source CMS, convenient non shell users, are solutions for remote editing lag

Hostfurl encourages web site development on a local standard shell (on a desktop, tablet or mobile) as a solution for remote customers and poor quality Internet connection. This provides a solution for frustrating editing lag from remote high lag and poor quality Internet connections. Finished edits are uploaded incrementally.

Hostfurl also encourages use of of integrated CMS for easy browser based editing of pre setup web sites (examples to be provided). Hence admins can setup CMS editable web sites for their users. The CMS is a web app that provides a wrapper for a Git triggered action using CI/CD, triggered when editing finished, that must be setup by an admin.

All customer servers include access to a limited secure shell to support access with ssh and remote updates with rsync. The shell includes basic shell commands with sh and bash, rsync, curl, wget, ping, nano (an editor) and mc (Midnight Commander file explorer but without dropping to shell with Ctrl + O). The remote shell does not include git and node/npm because it is not consistent with practices we encourage.

All this fits under 60MB but is not added to the user space quota despite each customer admin getting their own isolated process space and copy of binaries. while further binaries can be uploaded, it is discouraged and there is no convenient packaging system made available. Each owned (sub) server files of an admin, no matter what the domain name is, can be found in the domains directory of the shell.

npm run start will allow you to develop and view changes as you make them. site.prod is false.

npm run build generates a production build in _sites. site.prod is true

npm run stage allows the production build to be viewed locally.

If user is your SSH login name, my.example.com is your DNS site name and public_html is the directory off your home directory to upload

You can put a SSH public key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to avoid using a password.

To upload new files or change existing files incrementally:

rsync _site/ -rzvh user@my.example.com:public_html

To also delete files remotely that were deleted locally:

rsync _site/ -rzvh --delete user@my.example.com:public_html

If you need to use an absolute directory path then include / at the start of the path after :, such as:

rsync _site/ -rzvh user@my.example.com:/home/user/public_html

The included -v option shows files uploaded. Add in --progress to show progress of individual files. For files that already exist, incremental deltas of files are uploaded, not the full file.

After a rebuild, files will change due to cache busting, even with no content change. Rsync effciently finds, includes and uploads these changes without including the full file.

With heavy editing of sites with many files, consider turning off cache busting and turning on again when finished with final edit. If turning off cache busting, do not include --delete with rsync until cache busting is turned on again.

To turn off cache busting, comment out line

  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(eleventyAutoCacheBuster);

near start in minform/minform.config.js with // at start of line.

Depending on web server, turning off cache busting may prevent site updates from being viewed immediately with a browser refresh, unless a hard refresh or cache emptying with hard refresh is used.

An up to date and popular GitHub Action for rsync deployment, usable in CI/CD, is documented at Rsync Deployments Action

Minformhf is a tailored version of Minform specifically for Hostfurl.

Minform is a public website template using 11ty static website generator.

Minform is built on Build Awesome Starter version v0.8.1

Only Main, Contact and About pages provided

Only the simpler form approach is used

Page contents reduced