Faircamp on Windows

Tutorial Overview

This tutorial will guide you through installing faircamp, generating your first faircamp site, customizing it further through the use of manifests, and finally show you one (of many) ways to publish your site online.

Note that there also other great tutorials around, such as Meljoann's faircamp introduction (for all platforms), LinuxCreative's video guide (for Linux) and Johann Bourquenez's french faircamp tutorial (for all platforms). You can also mix and match these, each has its own style, but the approach is always the same.

Install faircamp

Download and run the Windows Installer (64-bit), then continue with the next step below.

Create your catalog folder

First, open your file explorer and create an empty directory in which we'll put your audio files and other data for the website (the catalog directory). It's name and location can be freely chosen, but for instance you could name it simply Catalog and put it in your Documents folder.

Add releases

Now you can fill the catalog directory with your audio material. Each release (single/album/episode/...) should have its own subdirectory (the release directory), into which you place the audio files (and optionally, cover image). You can also add further hierarchical organization by putting multiple releases in a containing folder (e.g. organizing by artist or by year) but this is optional and has no effect on the website later - faircamp will only group your audio material by release.

Note that you can always add more material later, so adding one or two release here will suffice for a first test. Add as many releases as you want, then move to the next step.

Run faircamp

In your file explorer, move to the directory that contains your catalog folder, so that you are ready to drag and drop the catalog folder itself (which we will do in a second).

Now open the start menu and begin typing the words "Command Prompt". You won't need to type it out in full as Windows will likely suggest the application of that name already after the first few letters - just type until you are offered the suggestion, then click on it. Inside the command prompt, type cd (this stands for "Change directory"), then press Space (this serves as a separator), and now drag and drop your catalog folder from your file explorer to the command prompt window. The active prompt line in your command prompt should now display something like cd C:\Example\Your Catalog\, and you can confirm the command (and thereby change directory) by pressing Enter.

Finally, to run faircamp inside your catalog folder (which we are now in), type faircamp.exe --preview and press Enter. Faircamp will now process your files, generate your website, and directly open the result in your browser (the latter because we added the --preview flag). Congratulations: You created your first faircamp site! Feel free to play around with the result, then come back to the next steps for learning how to customize it.

Customize the catalog

In your file explorer, move to the catalog folder (at its root). Create a new text document (Right click -> New -> Text Document), but instead of just changing the name, delete everything, including the .txt extension, and replace it with this exact name and extension: catalog.eno. When prompted "If you change a filename extension, the file might become unusable / Are you sure you want to change it?", confirm with Yes. Now right-click this new file, and go to the Open with submenu. Select Notepad, either directly (if available), or better yet through the Choose another app submenu, in which case you can also tick the box Always use this app to open .eno files so that next time you can just open the file in Notepad by double-clicking it straight away. Now open the Catalog reference page in Faircamp's manual and begin by copy-pasting the line # catalog from the manual page to your catalog.eno file. After this (and importantly below the line # catalog) begin to copy-paste any customization you would like to make (all of them are throroughly explained on the catalog reference page). For instance, you could place a line saying title: Test 123 to set your catalog title to "Test 123". Continue to make as many customizations as you like (for a first test one or two will suffice). Finally, make sure to save the updates you made to catalog.eno (File -> Save) and go back to your command prompt window. If it's still open from the last step, press Ctrl + C once (or multiple times if necessary) until faircamp terminates and the prompt signals that it awaits new input. Your command prompt should still point to the right location (the catalog folder) so you can just type faircamp.exe --preview again to rebuild the site and let it be opened in the browser. You should now see the changes you made reflected on the page. You can repeat this process as often as you like to customize your catalog further.

Customize a release

This step is almost identical to customizing the catalog (see previous step), with the following differences:

1. Instead of creating a catalog.eno file at the root of your catalog folder, create a release.eno file inside one of your release dirctories.
2. Instead of referring to the catalog reference page in the manual, this time look up and copy possible customizations from the Release reference page

That's all there is to it, give it a try by making one or two customizations for one of your releases, then move on to the next step.

Customize the theme

Customizing the theme technically works the same as customizing the catalog and release - you ulimately do it within the catalog.eno and release.eno files you created - but to make the process easier, we can use the interactive theming widget to discover the right settings. For this, start in the command prompt and terminate faircamp if it's already running (press Ctrl + C once, or multiple times if necessary). Now instead of running faircamp as usual, we add an additional "flag" to enable the theming widget, so the command becomes this: faircamp.exe --preview --theming-widget. Type it and confirm with Enter. When your site opens in the browser now, you will discover an overlay on every page that is almost fully transparent and only becomes visible when you hover your mouse over it. Inside this overlay, play with the different sliders to try out different designs for your pages. You can also move between pages - your experimental customizations will be carried over between them. When you are happy with the design, copy the lines that are displayed below "> Copy these customizations to a manifest in your catalog" (they always start with # theme) and paste them either to your catalog.eno file (if you want to apply the design to all your pages) or to any (or multiple) release.eno files (if you want to apply the design to specific pages). Afterwards rebuild the site without the --theming-widget flag (so the command should only be faircamp.exe --preview again) to see the design customizations statically applied to your site.

Coming soon: How to publish the site and go online

This is being written right now, meanwhile for this follow the other tutorials referenced in the "Tutorial Overview" section at the top.