Anarki

A publicly modifiable 'wiki-like' fork of Arc Lisp

The intention is to be extremely permissive in accepting patches. For commit privileges, just submit your first pull request or ask on Arc Language Forum.

Getting started

Installation

First install Racket (v6.11 or later), then

$ raco pkg install sha
$ git clone http://github.com/arclanguage/anarki
$ cd anarki
$ ./arc.sh    # start the interactive repl
$ cd apps/news
$ ./run-news  # or start News (also with the repl)

Tutorial

If you're new to Arc, or Lisp in general, a good starting point is the Tutorial.

Documentation and help

If you run into trouble, check

• Arc Language Forum
• Arc Language Wiki
• Arc Language Documentation
• Arc's built-in help system by typing (help) at the repl

News Site

Anarki comes bundled with News, a Hacker News style app.

Admins

To run News, first pick your (the admin's) username,

$ cd anarki/apps/news
$ mkdir www
$ echo __username__ > www/admins

You can have multiple admins. Add them all to www/admins, separated by whitespace.

Starting the server

Warning: If you are already running a News site, migrating to this fork might mess up your site's data. Come talk to us first, and be sure to make a backup before the migration.

Now bring up the server,

$ ./run-news

There'll be a pause while the server loads up, with some messages, then you'll see the arc> prompt.

Go to http://localhost:8080. Click on login, and create the account for your username. You should now be logged in as an admin.

(Don't worry about user break or error writing messages.)

Customization

To customize News, change the variables at the top of apps/news/news.arc. To change the port your server runs at, modify apps/news/run-news.arc.

Any interactive changes to the prompt will be reflected immediately in the server, without needing to restart it. Hence if you make any changes to apps/news/news.arc, you can load them, by typing (load "apps/news/news.arc") in the repl. If you stop the server or it dies for some reason, previously entered commands are available in the command history (at least if you have Readline installed).

HTTPS

You may want to serve News securely over HTTPS. An example configuration for running Nginx with SSL as a reverse proxy for News can be found in anarki/extras/news.nginx.conf.

Resetting passwords

For password reset mails to be sent out, your must set up an email account to send these from,

$ echo "someone@example.com" > www/app-email  ; email
$ echo "smtp.example.com" >> www/app-email     ; smtp server
$ echo "someone@example.com" >> www/app-email  ; user
$ echo "1234" >> www/app-email                 ; password

Development

Tests

Anarki has thorough automated tests.

# start in the anarki directory
$ ./arc.sh
arc> (load "tests.arc")

Anarki is explicitly not constrained to maintain compatibility with upstream releases, and compatibility status may swing wildly from commit to commit depending on who takes an interest. To see a list of what's different, type (incompatibilities) at the repl. If you make an incompatible change, please update this list.

Racket interop

Racket expressions can be evaluated with the ($ ...) syntax. For instance, (($ crypto-random-bytes) 16) obtains the crypto-random-bytes function from Racket and makes a call to it.

If you write lots of Racket code and you just want to use Anarki for part of a bigger project, you can raco pkg install anarki and use Anarki to write Racket modules:

#lang anarki
(:provide function-for-use-in-racket)

(= racket-import ($.dynamic-require ...))
(load "relative/path.arc")

(def utility-for-use-in-racket (x)
  (* x (racket-import x))

Scope

Note that Anarki does not have private module scopes; the (:provide ...) section is just there to make it easy to require an Anarki-based library from Racket.

Keyword arguments

Anarki has some issues passing keyword arguments to Racket functions, but Racket's keyword-apply can be used for that.