# Piedesaint

## In short

[Piedesaint](https://github.com/tnarik/piedesaint) is a minimal web server designed to expose directly files and directories (in [TAR](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_(computing) format) via HTTP or HTTPS.

## Motivation

It was born from the need of having the simplest web server possible (while still being reasonably fast and secure) to provide files and directories to be used by [remote_file](http://docs.opscode.com/resource_remote_file.html) Chef resources, solving the issue of distributing packages that for different reasons are not public or require some interaction to get downloaded, without requiring the installation of a full fledged web server.

It also serves directories (packaging them on the fly) as a single resource.

This is useful in the case of using chef-solo (combined with Vagrant, for instance, for testing) when database backups or internal git repositories or installation packages need to be transported to the client node but adding those packages to our cookbooks is not wanted or possible.

## Installation

You can add this line to your application's Gemfile:

	gem 'piedesaint'

And then execute:

    $ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

    $ gem install piedesaint

## Usage

After installation you will need to initialize the configuration by executing:
	
	$ sug init [list of folders to serve, in cascade order]

This creates the ```.piedesaint``` folder that you can inspect and configure (it contains a default shortlived SSL key/certificate pair and some additional configuration in [YAML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML) format).

By default the configuration will serve the current directory, unless a list of folders is specified. If you want to serve a different folder or set of folders, just edit the configuration.

After this, whenever you want to serve the files/directories, just execute:

	$ sug


## License

MIT

## Contributing

If you want to contribute:

1. Just fork this project.
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`).
3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am 'Add some feature'`).
4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`).
5. Create new Pull Request.