Ceramic ยป Releasing

Bundler

Ceramic applications can be compiled to native executables. This is done through the bundler, which compiles the app and its resources and external dependencies into a bundle. On Windows, the bundle is just a .zip file. On Unix, it's a tar file. The reason for this is that everyone on Windows can open a zip file, and zip files don't preserve executable permissions, which are rather important on Unix.

A bundle looks like this:

my-app.zip/
  my-app ;; Executable
  electron/
    ... ;; The Electron code required to manage browser windows
  resources/
    ... ;; Application resources

API

bundle(system-name &key bundle-pathname system-directory)
Compile the application to an executable, and ship it with its resources.

Resources

Every web application has external resources -- web assets like CSS and JavaScript. And most non-trivial applications also keep data (game maps, CAD files, etc.) in external files. In development, this data is usually stored along with the source code. When releasing an application, that data has to be bundled and released along with it.

Ceramic has tools for managing directories with resources: You map a symbol, like web-assets or game-data to some directory relative to the application (e.g. assets/build/). You access that directory using a function that maps the symbol to a directory: in development, it just returns the pathname to the original directory. When you release an app, all the resources are copied over to the release, and the function returns the path the copied resource directory in the release.

For instance, assuming an application named my-app:

(use-package :ceramic.resource)

(define-resources :my-app () ;; Name of the system
  (web-assets #p"assets/build/")
  (landsat-images #p"data/landsat/")
  (icons #p"assets/icons/"))

Then, to access the direcotry for the web assets, you use the resource-directory function:

;;; In development

(resource-directory 'web-assets)
;; => /home/eudoxia/code/my-app/assets/build/

;;; In production

(resource-directory 'web-assets)
;; my-app/resources/web-assets/

To easily create a pathname relative to a resource directory, you have the resource function:

;;; In development

(resource 'web-assets #p"css/style.css")
;; => /home/eudoxia/code/my-app/assets/build/css/style.css

;;; In production

(resource 'web-assets #p"css/style.css")
;; my-app/resources/web-assets/css/style.css

API

define-resources(system-name nil &rest pairs)
Define resource tags for a system.
resource-directory(resource-tag)
Return the directory associated to a resource tag.
resource(resource-tag pathname)
Return the pathname of a resource relative to the directory of a resource tag.