Hack Lang Example Site

Why does this site exist?

The purpose of this site is to provide examples of how to use the Hack Language. This site should help in the following ways:

1. This site is written in Hack and is open source. You can browse the source code for real world examples
2. You can clone and deploy this site yourself. This site is designed to be simple to make this as easy as possible.
3. The contents of this site consist of a Cookbook of Hack Recipes. Each Recipe is a short Hack example that solves some common, interesting typing problem.

If you haven't already, I recommend checking out the official documentation.

Is this site hosted anywhere?

Yes, at cookbook.hacklang.org

Deploying the site

This site is intended to be easy to deploy. Install and configure HHVM and your webserver of choice, clone the GitHub, install the dependencies with Composer and you should be done!

Installing HHVM & Webserver

You can either install one of the many HHVM packages or build it from source yourself. I recommend following this blog post to set up hhvm with FastCGI. If you're adventurous, the nightly builds are pretty cool too.

Cloning the hack-example-site GitHub

If you're reading this README you probably already found the source code, but the source code lives here.

Installing Composer dependencies

This site uses Composer to manage it's dependencies. If you're new to Composer, check out the Composer getting started guide.

Example setup for HHVM + Nginx on Ubuntu 13.10

Nginx is a popular webserver and what I used when building this site. Here are instructions for how I set up my environment.

Clone the GitHub

You can clone it wherever you like, but for this example I'm putting it in ~/hack-example-site

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/hhvm/hack-example-site.git

Install dependencies

The Hack Example Site uses Composer to manage its dependencies. Composer is easy to install and easy to use. To install Composer, you just curl the installation script. To install the dependencies you just run the install command. For more information about this step, see the Composer getting started guide.

cd hack-example-site
sudo apt-get install curl
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
php composer.phar install

Install Nginx

sudo apt-get install nginx

Install HHVM

Instructions copied from HHVM wiki

wget -O - http://dl.hhvm.com/conf/hhvm.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo deb http://dl.hhvm.com/ubuntu saucy main | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hhvm.list 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hhvm

Copy the HHVM config file

There is a simple hhvm.ini HHVM config in this repo, which you can use. I just overwrite the server.ini file, since that's the config that init.d uses. You can always edit the service or start hhvm yourself if you'd rather not overwrite server.ini

// Assuming you cloned hack-example-site to ~/hack-example-site
// If you don't want to overwrite server.ini you can always point hhvm 
// to a config elsewhere
sudo cp ~/hack-example-site/hhvm.ini /etc/hhvm/server.ini

Set up the Nginx config

// Assuming you cloned hack-example-site to ~/hack-example-site
sudo cp ~/hack-example-site/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/hack-example-site
sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/hack-example-site /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/hack-example-site
// Disable the default config. Or don't. It's up to you.
sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
// Update the root and fastcgi_param directives to point to ~/hack-example-site
sudo vim /etc/nginx/sites-available/hack-example-site
// Verify that the config parses
sudo nginx -t

Start everything up

sudo service hhvm-fastcgi start
sudo service nginx start

Load a page in your browser!

Try going to localhost in your browser of choice

Example setup for Heroku

Get a Heroku account and install the toolbelt

If you don't already have a Heroku account, start here: https://id.heroku.com/signup

Clone the repo and check out the heroku branch

git clone https://github.com/pvh/hack-example-site.git
cd hack-example-site

Add a "Procfile" which tells Heroku to start your app using HHVM

echo 'web: vendor/bin/heroku-hhvm-nginx' > Procfile
git add .
git commit -am "add a Procfile so that foreman/heroku know how to start the app"

Create a heroku app and push the code

git push heroku master
heroku open