Breakdown is a lightweight python webserver that parses jinja2 templates. It's intended to be used by designers for doing rapid prototyping.
Breakdown needs a templates directory and a static directory to serve from. If your working directory contains these, you can simply run breakdown with no arguments:
$ breakdown
Or, you can specify the path to a directory containing templates and static:
$ breakdown /path/to/project
Breakdown will also work with a django project structure. If the project path contains an apps directory, breakdown will automatically detect this and combine the static and templates directories for each django app. You'll also get a listing of the directories it found. Here's the output of running breakdown on a django project with two apps: 'mainsite' and 'blog':
$ breakdown ~/django/myproject Serving templates from: /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/templates /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/templates Serving static data from: /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/blog/static /Users/josh/django/myproject/apps/mainsite/static
Once breakdown is running, it will print the local URL the webserver is listening on:
Server running at http://127.0.0.1:5000 ...
You can now view templates in your browser by navigating to http://127.0.0.1:5000. However, you won't see anything here unless one of your template directories contains a file named index.html. The URL of any template (besides index.html) will be identical to its filename, with all relative paths preserved. Below is an example of template filenames and their corresponding URL on the local server:
| Template | URL |
| index.html | http://127.0.0.1:5000/ |
| article.html | http://127.0.0.1:5000/article |
| blog/index.html | http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog |
| blog/post.html | http://127.0.0.1:5000/blog/post |
Note: The server will accept template URL's with or without .html appended to them
- Command line options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit -p PORT, --port=PORT run server on an alternate port (default is 5000) -m, --media treat MEDIA_URL as STATIC_URL in templates -v, --version display the version number and exit