Starless: Now With Less Mass

I'll keep it brief but Starless is now using static generation to serve pages, instead of just serving directly through the EntryRepository in PHP every time.

Why? I'll tell you why. Because some degenerate, shithead of a script kiddy with a terminal and a "botnet" called epic_bot.py on their fucking desktop thought it'd be a wonderful idea to shoot a constant stream of requests to the site for a fixed period of a few hours.

Starless has been live for just under 48 hours and it already has more errors than views, thanks to this rock-brained gremlin.

You want to know the worst bit?

It took under 24 fucking hours for me to see a request come through, attempting to enumerate users via the WP REST API. That is how prolific people trying to exploit WordPress are now. They just wing it with every new site that manifests.

Sigh. It really isn't WordPress. I promise you.

And, don't get me wrong, whilst I did want to implement static generation in, I wanted to do it on my terms.

A brief glimpse into the expanse

Static generation in Tempest is actually wildly simplistic. Have a look at the route actions in the EntryController:

#[StaticPage]
#[Get('/')]
public function index(): Response|View {
	return $this->list();
}

#[StaticPage(PaginationDataProvider::class)]
#[Get('/page/{page}')]
public function paginated(int $page): Response|View {
	return $this->list($page);
}

private function list(int $page = 1): Response|View {
	$paginated = $this->repository->paginate($page - 1);

	if ($page > $paginated['maxPages']) {
		return new Redirect('nevermore');
	}

	return view(
		'View/pages/home.view.php',
		entries: $paginated['entries'],
		page: $page,
		maxPages: $paginated['maxPages'],
	);
}

#[StaticPage(EntryDataProvider::class)]
#[Get('/{slug}')]
public function read(string $slug): Response|View {
	$entry = $this->repository->find($slug);

	if (!$entry) {
		return new Redirect('nevermore');
	}

	return view('View/pages/entry.view.php', entry: $entry);
}

That's it.

You tell the framework you want a specific route to be static and you run tempest static:generate. And then it does it.

It's obviously just a touch more complex for two of our routes there. You can see, for /page/{page} and /{slug}, we're giving the attribute data provider classes. Similarly though, data providers aren't really that difficult once you read through the documentation:

class EntryDataProvider implements DataProvider {
	public function __construct(
		private EntryRepository $repository,
	) {}

	public function provide(): Generator {
	    foreach ($this->repository->all()->toArray() as $entry) {
			yield [
				'slug' => $entry->slug,
			];
		}
	}
}

Grab the entries in the repository, iterate over them, and then yield the arguments that would be passed to each static call for specific iteration. Once you wrap your head around the point, it slots together nicely.

The data provider for the paginated structure is just as simple, frankly, but I'll let you go find one on the repository yourself.

Final thoughts

Like I said, to whichever moron it is who thinks Python is a low-level fucking language, knock it off. Get a job. What are you actively seeking inside of WordPress sites? Having maintained a lot them for over a decade, I can tell you, from experience, they're really not that interesting.

I did want to add tagging to Starless today but I've had to focus on this, amongst other things. The View system is still causing some issues but, if I'm being entirely honest, broken markup is the least of my worries right now.