Lavandula

⚠️ Notice: Lavandula is still in early development and not ready for production use.
Expect frequent breaking changes and incomplete documentation.

Lavandula is a lightweight, fast, and intuitive C web framework designed for building modern web applications quickly. It focuses on simplicity, performance, and productivity, providing all the essentials without the bloat of heavier frameworks.

Example

#include "lavandula.h" 

// define a route for your app
appRoute(home) {
  return ok("Hello, World");
}

int main() {
  // initialise your app
  App app = createApp();

  // register a route in your app
  get(&app, "/home", home);

  // run the app
  runApp(&app);
}

Todo App Example

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  AppBuilder builder = createBuilder();
  useSqlLite3(&builder, "init.db");
  
  App app = build(builder);

  get(&app, "/getTodos", getTodos);
  get(&app, "/getTodo", getTodo);
  post(&app, "/createTodo", createTodo);
  post(&app, "/updateTodo", updateTodo);
  post(&app, "/deleteTodo", deleteTodo);

  runApp(&app);

  return 0;
}

Endpoint Example

appRoute(getTodos) {
    DbResult *result = dbQueryRows(ctx.db, "select * from todos;", NULL, 0);
    returnIfNull(result, "Database query failed");

    JsonBuilder *root = jsonBuilder();
    JsonArray array = jsonArray();
    jsonPutArray(root, "todos", &array);
    
    for (int i = 0; i < result->rowCount; i++) {
        jsonArrayAppend(&array, todoToJson(rowToTodo(result->rows[i])));
    }

    char *json = jsonStringify(root);
    freeJsonBuilder(root);

    return ok(json);
}

Features

• Controller and routing system
• HTTP endpoint support (GET, POST, etc)
• Controller local/global middleware pipeline
• Minimal dependencies (pure C)
• Quick project scaffolding via the CLI
• Built-in unit testing framework
• Environment variable support
• Built-in logging
• SQLite integration
• Built-in JSON library
• Static file serving

In Progress

Future

• TLS
• Session cookies
• CORS policy configuration
• Multithreading
• Rate Limiting
• PostgreSL, MySQL integrations, etc

Installation

To install Lavandula, follow these setps.

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/ashtonjamesd/lavandula.git
cd lavandula

2. Run the install script

./install.sh

You should see the following:

[SUCCESS] 🎉 Lavandula installation completed!

Quick Start:
 lavu new my-project # Create a new project
 cd my-project
 lavu run # Run your project

Documentation:
 GitHub: https://github.com/ashtonjamesd/lavandula

3. Finish

You should now be able to run the Lavu CLI tool and begin writing your application. Refer to api.md for how to use Lavu.

Getting Started

1. Create a new project

lavu new myProject

This will set up an application folder structure and copy the Lavandula /src directory into the created folder structure. This allows you to easily compile the framework and your app together.

Output:

Setting up Lavandula project 'myProject'...

-> Created myProject/lavandula.yml
-> Created myProject/app/app.c
-> Created myProject/app/controllers/controllers.h
-> Created myProject/app/controllers/home.c
-> Created myProject/app/routes.c
-> Created myProject/app/routes.h
-> Created myProject/makefile
-> Created myProject/tests/tests.c
-> Created myProject/README.md
...

🎉 Lavandula project 'myProject' setup finished successfully!

Next steps:
  1. cd myProject
  2. lavu run

2. Run

lavu run

Your application will run on http://localhost:3000/.

3. Read the docs

   • Developing with Lavandula
   • API Documentation

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Feel free to submit pull requests or open issues for feature requests or bugs.

Some things that probably need looking at are:

• memory leaks
• outdated and unfinished documentation (API changes warrant a docs update)
• The JSON library does not currently support nested lists
• Some tests need to be written...

License

Lavandula is registered under the MIT License.