Harp Weekly – Harp v0.11.1 is authsome

Harp v0.11.1 was released this week, adding support for HTTP Basic Authentication. This makes it easy to password protect an entire Harp app.

An animation showing how basic authentication works with Harp and a Project Hub.

Password protecting a static Project Hub

Last Harp Weekly, Brad Frost’s Project Hub was featured, originally introduced in his article for 24 ways. He says a Project Hub

consolidates all the key design and development materials onto a single webpage … (either publicly available or password protected), so that everyone involved in the team has easy access to it. Brad Frost, Project Hubs: A Home Base for Design Projects

With basic authentication, Harp is even better for Project Hubs, as you can quickly add password protection to an entire site needed. Jorge Pedret’s Project Hub boilerplate for Harp is ready to support this; just update the _harp.json file.

Install Harp

More examples of how to add basic authentication are now available in Harp’s documentation. You can get started by installing or updating Harp with:

sudo npm install -g harp

You may omit sudo if you’re using Windows.

Interviewed by BetaKit

BetaKit, a Canadian publication about emerging technology, interviewed Harp’s Brock Whitten and Rob Ellis. The co-creators of the Harp Platform and PhoneGap discuss Harp, the influence of the Apache Cordova/PhoneGap model, and web publishing in general:

The point isn’t that we’re building this product, the point is that the web is the product Brock Whitten, Vancouver’s Harp.io makes web publishing open and easy

If you’re interested in part of the story behind Harp, I think you’ll enjoy this article by John Gray.

No more configuration

Rob Ellis also wrote about at Harp’s implicit preprocessing, and why you might want to move away from configuration-dependant setups. He says if you’re writing configuration to manage your assets, you’re doing it wrong.

Deploying Harp to Octohost

Octohost is a Heroku-esque platform based on Docker, with support for Node and Harp. There’s a default application ready for you to clone on GitHub if you’d like to try out deploying there.

A screenshot of the default Octohost and Harp application.

Speeding up Docker deploys with Harp and Octohost

Darron Froese’s has written a post on speeding up Docker deploys for deploying Harp applications on Octohost. Froese’s studio is

building a platform to help deploy simple sites for our clients. The platform is called Handbill, under the scenes it’s using Harp and octohost. Darron Froese, Speeding up Docker deploys

Recipes: Next/Prev links, RSS feeds

The RSS feed recipe was improved this week, adding more details and comments.

There was also a request for how to create next and previous links in a static blog using Harp. I’ve started with an examples on GitHub, and hb-remedy boilerplate boilerplate has been updated to have them, too. A full recipe is forthcoming!

If you have any questions about getting started with Harp, or suggestions for recipes you’d like to see, the join the #harp IRC channel—it’s now available directly on harpjs.com.

Next Harp Weekly

Another version of Harp is already in underway. Follow @HarpWebServer on Twitter to be notified first.