QuickStart

Creating a module

The basic idea behind rikitiki is that each module that can push some information to a webpage should just be a collection of handlers. Modules are simply structs with a Register function:

using namespace rikitiki;
struct HelloWorldModule {
   void Register(Server& h) { }
};

will define a functional, albeit useless, module.

To make it functional, we need to add handlers. Most of the time, you want to add routes, which you can do like so:

using namespace rikitiki;
struct HelloWorldModule {
  void Register(Server& h){
    h.AddHandle( CreateRoute<>::With(this, "/hello") );
    h.AddHandle( CreateRoute<int>::With(this, "/{number}") );
    h.AddHandle( CreateRoute<std::string>::With(this, "/{word}") );
  }

  void operator()(ConnContext& ctx){
    ctx << "Hello world!";
  }

   void operator()(ConnContext& ctx, int number){
     ctx << "Number: " << number;
  }

  void operator()(ConnContext& ctx, const std::string& word){
    ctx << "Word: " << word;
  }
};

This will create three entry points for your site. When called, they will simply display the text streamed to the ConnContext object.

Running a web server

A module on it's own, even with entry points, is still a little useless – to make it run we have to incorporate it into either an apache module or create an executable for it on top of mongoose. Neither is particularly hard to do.

Mongoose

We can instantiate and run a mongoose server against a module with:

using namespace rikitiki::mongoose;
int main(){
  MongooseServer server(5000);
  HelloWorldModule module;

  server.Register(module);
  server.Start();
  while(true){
    sleep(1000);
  }
  return 0;
}

Running this executable will start a server on port 5000. Test each entry point with:

• http://localhost:5000/hello
• http://localhost:5000/42
• http://localhost:5000/testing

Apache

Running the module in apache is more involved, but not by much. A macro does most of the code set-up for us:

RegisterApacheHandler(helloWorld, HelloWorldModule);

when compiled to a shared object, this will expose a 'helloWorld_module' to apache. Supposing we compiled a 'mod_helloWorld.so' shared object, we need to take that file and copy or link it to apaches modules directory. On most linux systems, that is going to be /etc/httpd/modules.

Then we need to add the following line to the httpd.conf file (usually at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf on linux systems):

LoadModule helloWorld_module modules/mod_helloWorld.so

or

LoadModule helloWorld_module modules/mod_helloWorld.dll

for windows.

Run or restart apache, and the module should be loaded and available:

• http://localhost/hello
• http://localhost/42
• http://localhost/testing

Clearly though, these addresses are dependent on the particular apache configuration.