Damper

The damper is a small HTTP server which is useful for local development. It is installed as a binary and should be available as damper in your terminal. If not, check that you have installed Commonplace via npm install -g commonplace.

Overview

The damper, when run without any arguments, starts an HTTP server in the current directory. It should be run from the root of a project. By default, it will listen on localhost:8675. This server will always serve src/index.html unless the path can be found in src/. I.e.: static files will be served, and all other URLs will return src/index.html.

A basic file watcher will also be started, which will compile Stylus to CSS and Nunjucks templates to JS.

Configuration

You can pass --port 1234 to specify a port. Hosts can be specified via --host 1.2.3.4.

Two other sources of configuration can also be passed. If a "host" or "port" field is specified in the JSON file ~/.damperrc (where ~ is the environment variable HOME) for a key corresponding to the project directory. E.g.:

{
  "/opt/my_proj": {"port": 9000},
  "~/src/my_other_proj": {"host": "localhost.dev", "port": 9001}
}

The same information can also be specified in the src/.commonplace manifest for a project:

{
  "version": "0.2.0",
  "port": 8676
}