TutorialWebSite

Tutorial: Create A Web Site

@video

In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a web site like this with NPL. The following topics will be covered:

• setup NPL web development environment
• NPL server page programming model
• Debugging and logs
• Use table database
• MVC frameworks for serious web development

For complete explanation behind the scene, please read WebServer

Setup NPL web development environment

For more information, see Install Guide. The following is only about setting up the recommended IDE under win32.

• Install Git so that you can call git command from your cmd line.
• Download ParacraftSDK
  • or you can clone it by running:

git clone https://github.com/LiXizhi/ParaCraftSDK.git

• Make sure you have updated to the latest version, by running ./redist/paracraft.exe at least once
• Run ./NPLRuntime/install.bat
  • The NPL Runtime will be automatically copied from ./redist folder to ./NPLRuntime/win/bin
  • The above path will be added to your %path% variable, so that you can run npl script from any folder.
• Download and install Visual Studio Community Edition: the free version of visual studio
  • In visual studio, select menu::Tools::Extensions, and search online for npl or lua to install following plugins: NPL/Lua language service for visual studio: this will give you all the syntax highlighting, intellisense and debugging capability for NPL in visual studio.

Create a New Visual Studio Project

NPL is a dynamic language, it does not require you to build anything in order to run, so you can create any type of visual studio project you like and begin adding files to it.

There are two ways to do it. Please use the lazy way but read the manual one.

The lazy way

• run git clone https://github.com/tatfook/wikicraft.git
• cd into the source directory and run ./update_packages.bat
• open the sln file with visual studio
• run start.bat, you will see the npl server started.
  • visit http://localhost:8099 for the main site.
  • visit http://127.0.0.1:8099 for the NPL code wiki web site.
• rename the project to your preferred name and begin coding in the ./www folder. (see next chapter)
• finally, see the configure the project property step in the manual one section.

The manual one

• create an empty visual studio project: such as a C# library or VC++ empty project.
• install the main npl package into your project root directory.

mkdir npl_packages
cd npl_packages
git clone https://github.com/NPLPackages/main.git

• configure the project property to tell visual studio to start NPLRuntime with proper command line parameters when we press Ctrl+F5.
  • For the external program: we can use either npl.bat or ParaEngineClient.exe, see below
  • external program: D:\lxzsrc\ParaCraftSDKGit\NPLRuntime\win\bin\ParaEngineClient.exe
  • command line parameters: bootstrapper="script/apps/WebServer/WebServer.lua" port="8099" root="www/" servermode="true" dev="D:/lxzsrc/wikicraft/"
  • working directory: D:/lxzsrc/wikicraft/
    • Note: the dev param and working directory should be the root of your web project directory.
• add main project at npl_packages/main/*.csproj to your newly created solution file, so that you have all the source code of NPL and NPL web server for debugging and documentation.
• create www/ directory and add index.page file to it.
• Press Ctrl+F5 in visual studio, and you will launch the web server.
  • visit http://localhost:8099/index.page in your browser.

NPL server page programming model

Debugging and logs

Use table database

MVC frameworks for serious web development