Benjamin

Getting Started

Install Benjamin, run composer and launch the application with php artisan serve. Then you can start to build your website.

Once installed, you can start adding new web pages. You don’t have to worry about URLs, they will be automatically deduced by the page’s filename stripping out the file extension.

Client side you will have, out of the box, an instant navigation for each link between your web pages. Benjamin will use the pushState api to update the URL when a page is changed, but it will automatically fallback to a standard navigation if the browser doesn’t support pushState.

Note: using Benjamin you have to think to your website like a Single-Page Application since web pages are directly changed client-side. This have some implications on how the javascript code is loaded and executed. Take a look to the Scripts section for more informations.

After you added some web pages, you may want to create layouts to share a common structure between pages, or you can play with page transitions and callbacks if you need to control the switching process from a page to another one. Also you may need to add a contact form in your website that will send an email when it is triggered, or you can enable the multi-language support if your website need to provide more than one language. You will find all this really simple and straightforward.

For what kind of websites you should consider Benjamin

You should consider to use Benjmian if your website is a static website, in the sense that content of pages is fixed and can change only when you manually modify it.

This is a list of functionalities already supported by Benjamin:

If your website must have all or some of above functionalities you should consider to use Benjamin. If your website needs more advanced features perhaps you may want to use other solutions or you can take in account to customize your Benjamin installation adding features you need.

In general, you should avoid to use Benjamin if your website:

Requirements

You need to have composer installed on your PC in order to be able to download all Benjamin’s dependencies. This is not really required on the production server.

Also, these are PHP requirements from Laravel:

Installation

Download the latest version from GitHub, extract it and rename the folder with the name of your project, e.g. my-website. Then from inside the project’s folder type:

$ composer install
$ cp .env.example .env
$ php artisan key:generate

The first command will download all PHP dependencies. Then you will create the .env file copying it from the example provided. This file will store all your configurations. Finally, the last command will automatically generate an unique application key for you, storing it inside the .env file.

Troubleshooting

If it is the first time you run Composer, can happen that you get an error like the one below when you run composer install:

Could not fetch https://api.github.com/repos/username/repo/zipball/863df9687835c62aa423a22412d26fa2ebde3fd3, please create a GitHub OAuth token to go over the API rate limit
Head to https://github.com/settings/tokens/new?scopes=repo&description=Composer+on+my+PC
to retrieve a token. It will be stored in "/home/user/.composer/auth.json" for future use by Composer.
Token (hidden):

To solve this you need a GitHub account, then simply follow instructions from the error message, that are:

Start The Application

From the application root’s folder just type:

$ php artisan serve

Then visit http://localhost:8000 and you will see a welcome page.

Now you can start adding your own web pages and folders, and building your website.

Note: in the production server you shouldn’t use php artisan serve but rely on Apache (or Nginx) instead. Take a look on the Website Deployment section for more informations.

Application Structure

A Benjamin website is a Laravel application, so you can take a look here for any detail about the whole application’s structure.

However we want to create simple and static websites, so it is not needed to know in depth the whole structure. You can build the website working only inside these two folders:

Next: Website Pages