icnfnt

About the project

Icnfnt is a simple way to create subsets of the excellent FontAwesome icon font maintained by Dave Gandy. We created this because we needed it for our clients, but we learned so much about about Font Forge, Flask, and Angular.js in the process that we decided to open source it so you could benefit, too.

Setup on Ubuntu 12.04

Setting up the dependancies

# Package manager for Python. You can use easy_install, but I am assumimg it's pip.
sudo apt-get install python-pip
# Fontforge is what does the heavy lifting and they have a python interface to issue commands.
sudo apt-get install python-fontforge
# flask is the framework we are using
sudo pip install Flask
# For zipping up the font packages
sudo apt-get install zip

Setting up the code

# We need a directory for the code.  I'm going to put it in /srv/icnfnt.
APP_DIR='/srv/icnfont'
# We also need a user that will be running the application and updating the code, for now I'll use my current user
APP_USER=$(whoami)
# Let's create the directory and set the permissions
sudo mkdir $APP_DIR
sudo chown -R $APP_USER:$APP_USER $APP_DIR
sudo chmod -R 750 $APP_DIR
# Install git if you don't already have if (If you don't....feel my judgement)
sudo apt-get install git
# clone the repository
git clone git://github.com/johnsmclay/icnfnt.git $APP_DIR

Running the code (Basic)

cd $APP_DIR
cp icnfnt.cfg.basic_example icnfnt.cfg
export ICNFNT_CONFIG=$APP_DIR/icnfnt.cfg
python icnfnt.py

you should see the following:

 * Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/
 * Restarting with reloader

This means the code is running in debug mode. In debug mode you can go to http://ip_or_name_of_your_box:5000/index.html and everything should work.

Running the code (Production)

# A better python web server than the built-in one (threading, etc.)
sudo pip install tornado
# Used to Daemonize the process
sudo pip install python-daemon
# Create a place for Tornado to log to
sudo mkdir /var/log/tornado/
# Allow Tornado to log to it
sudo chown root:$APP_USER /var/log/tornado
sudo chmod 770 /var/log/tornado
# Copy the init.d script out of the management dir
sudo cp management/icnfnt-tornado /etc/init.d/
# Allow it to execute
sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/icnfnt-tornado
# NOTE: be sure and change the APP_DIR in the init.d script to match yours
# Swap the config file to the production one
mv icnfnt.cfg icnfnt.cfg.basic_example
cp icnfnt.cfg.production_example icnfnt.cfg
sudo /etc/init.d/icnfnt-tornado start

Using with a web server (Production)

You usually don't want your static files served by python so I set up Nginx to serve up the static files and pass the rest back to python.

sudo apt-get install nginx
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/icnfnt

# Paste in the following and edit to match your settings:
###########################
server {
        client_max_body_size 20M;
        listen 80;
        # A list of DNS entries this will respond to, you can omit it to accept any DNS entry or IP
        server_name icnfnt.com www.icnfnt.com;

        root    /srv/icnfnt/static/;

        # Everything in this directory will be passed back to python
        location /api {
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header Host $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                # change localhost:5000 to the ip/name and port your python is listening on
                proxy_pass http://localhost:5000;
                allow all;
        }

        # A status page for management
        location /nginx_status {
                stub_status on;
                access_log   off;
                # Allow addresses or subnets to access the status page
                allow 10.0.0.0/8;
                allow 172.16.0.0/12;
                allow 192.168.0.0/16;
                deny all;
        }
}
###########################

# Enable the site we just created
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/icnfnt /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/icnfnt
# Allow Nginx to read the files (it runs as www-data)
sudo chown -R $APP_USER:www-data $APP_DIR
# To apply the changes
sudo service nginx reload

Go to http://ip_or_name_of_your_box
Do a little dance...make a little love...get down tonight.