Moonfall: CSS with variables

A program to generate CSS, either dynamically as a cgi script, or run from the command line.

Used in its simplest way- you get variables in css.

Used in its most advanced way- you can write a powerful Lua script to create and modify CSS.

You will need to know very little programming to accomplish much with Moonfall. If you could make sense of the above examples you are half way to Moonfall mastery.

Why write a computer language when you can borrow one? Lua is designed to be embedded in other programs. It's also easy to use and looks almost familiar to web programmers.

Lua is built into Moonfall. Moonfall handles tasks like reading in the css template file, doing substitutions, converting Lua data into css and outputting the css. Lua handles the hard stuff like figuring out what you want Moonfall to do. Lua is Moonfall's brain. As smart as Lua is, it doesn't know what css is or what to do with it, that is why it needs Moonfall.

All it does is text substitutions in a css file, why doesn't Moonfall generate all the css?

At first I tried to write a language that generated CSS. I quickly came to realize that CSS is very good at describing itself and no programming syntax comes close. Try inventing a language syntax thats better at describing this:

#container div #nav span a:hover { color:red }

So I decided to have the markup do what its best at and the programming language do what its best at, and figure out a way to combine them in a user friendly way.

As cgi script or a command line script to generate a static css file, as shown in the first example.

You need Moonfall installed (or just downloaded and sitting someplace where it can be found), a script to run it and tell it what to do, and a css template file.

Nope. If you run Moonfall as a cgi script, then just put the correct name in the html tag that references the css. To rename the css template file (moonfall.css is the default), change the top line of your Moonfall script to look like this:

#!/usr/bin/env css=/path/to/css/file moonfall

Lua means moon in Portuguese (Lua is from Brazil). Fall comes from cascading styles sheets. Yes I know it's a ridiculous name for software.

No, you can run it to generate a static css file. But it's easier for development to run it dynamically so it updates the css automatically. This is shown in the first example.

Lua is a fast, and Moonfall is coded in c, so it's a pretty fast combination. You might never have a performance problem running it as a cgi script. For faster cgi performance you can tell Moonfall to cache the output in a file like this:

#!/usr/bin/env cache=/tmp/moonfall.cache moonfall

If that is still not fast enough just use Moonfall from the command line and redirect the output into a file. Be sure to use the -http switch to suppress the headers. For example:

prompt> ./moonfall.cgi -http > static.css

Put the Moonfall binary someplace the web server has permission to run it. The same directory as your moonfall.cgi script is fine. Then at the top of your script put the full path to Moonfall.

#!/usr/bin/env /path/to/moonfall

You can run it from the command line. If the css output is distracting you can suppress it with -css. Keep in mind that you can debug it just like a regular script, in other words, with lots of print()'s :)

Any global variable in the Lua script will be substituted into the css in the corresponding tag. In other words, if the global variable in the Moonfall script is MyVar = "blue", it will be substituted at the tag [MyVar] as blue.

Strings are unaltered, like "1.2em", but numbers are appended with "px". So MyVar=1 would result in "1px".

A Lua table looks like this (notice the underscore in background_color!):

goth_theme = {
color = "red",
background_color = "black",
}

This will be placed into the css as

color: red;
background-color: black;

You can nest tables using dummy keys, just make sure you don't reuse the same key in the same table or they will overwrite.

float_attrs = {
float = "left",
clear = "both",
}

all_attrs = {
dummy1 = goth_theme,
dummy2 = float_attrs,
}

Moonfall will flatten nested tables, so from [all_attrs] you'll get:

color: red;
background-color: black;
float: left;
clear: both;

Moonfall should take care of all the indenting so the output looks good. It will also figure out if you wanted the attributes all on one line or each on it's own line, for example:

#content {
[all_attrs]
}

will output as

#content {
color: red;
background-color: black;
float: left;
clear: both;
}

but:

#content { [all_attrs] }

Will output as #content { color: red; background-color: black; float: left; clear: both; }

So far it's the only Lua function provided by Moonfall.

You provide it with a total value, and a number of other keys, setting the unknowns to false, and it will figure out the unknown values and return it as a table. You can use this function, or a chain of these, to have the dimensions of your web design automatically rescale based off a few values. For example:

page_width = 800

widths = fill {
total = page_width,
left = false,
center = 600,
right = false.
}

The results will be:

widths.left is 100
widths.center is 600
widths.right is 100

If you change total to 1000 the new values would be:

widths.left is 200
widths.center is 600
widths.right is 200

If you gave left a value of 100 rather than false you'd get:

widths.left is 100
widths.center is 600
widths.right is 300

Keep in mind that these results can be parameters for another fill function, and so on:

center_widths = fill {
total = widths.center,
left = false,
center = false,
right = false.
}

So all together you'll have:

widths.left is 100
widths.center is 600
widths.right is 300
center_widths.left is 200
center_widths.center is 200
center_widths.right is 200

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For binaries just uncompress and move to where you can run it, for source follow these instructions.

Download Lua source from this page
tar xvfz lua-5.1.2.tar.gz
Download Moonfall latest source
mv latest_moonfall.tar.gz lua-5.1.2
cd lua-5.1.2
tar xvfz latest_moonfall.tar.gz
cd moonfall_source
make lua
make
Put the resulting moonfall binary wherever you need it. If you have root access consider installing it into /usr/local/bin, or maybe /usr/bin so you only have to start your Moonfall scripts with #!/usr/bin/env moonfall, but if you don't have permission for that just move it anywhere you can run it, but start your scripts with
#!/usr/bin/env /anywhere/you/can/run/it/moonfall

GNU General Public License 3 , or (at your option) any later version. If this is a real problem contact me, but don't ask me legal questions because you'll get what you payed for.