Monolune

Getting started with Ocsigen

Ocsigen is a web framework for OCaml that has a very special feature: it allows one to write tierless applications. This means that the line between front-end and back-end is blurred, and the entire application can be written in OCaml. That allows one to make use OCaml libraries and features such as type-safety. There is no need to write JavaScript. This guide will lead you through the installation steps on Ubuntu (or Debian), and after that, present a small hello world example that can be run locally.

Installation

To install Eliom (a component of Ocsigen), update the package lists, and install the dependencies of Eliom:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
    libev-dev libgdbm-dev libncurses5-dev libpcre3-dev \
    libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev libcairo-ocaml-dev m4 \
    opam camlp4-extra \
    libgmp-dev

After that, use OPAM (the OCaml package manager) to install eliom:

opam init
opam install eliom

Now that you have Eliom installed, you can create a new Eliom project.

Creating an Eliom project

To create a new Eliom project:

eliom-distillery -name helloworld -target-directory helloworld

This will create a directory named helloworld that contains your Eliom project. This directory contains a file that has a .eliom extension. This is where the source code of the web application goes.

Writing a Hello World application

Replace the contents of the helloworld.eliom file with the following:

let hello_world = Eliom_content.Html.D.(
    Eliom_registration.Html.create
        ~path:(Eliom_service.Path [""])
        ~meth:(Eliom_service.Get Eliom_parameter.unit)
        (fun () () -> Lwt.return
            (html (head (title (pcdata "Hello World")) [])
                  (body [h1 [pcdata "Hello World."]]))))

After that, run make test.byte, open your web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080. You should see a page that containing 'Hello World.'.

I hope that was good enough of an example to get you started on this web framework. Ocsigen and Eliom are capable of so much more than the conventional back-end web frameworks out there. I urge you to read the Ocsigen documentation and its tutorials.