Character Generator

This is the source repository for a Halberds & Helmets character generator.

The character generator is currently installed on Campaign Wiki. Take a look at the Help page. It comes with links to examples of what this web application can do.

If you want to report bugs, provide feedback, fix typos or collaborate in any other way, feel free to contact me.

Running it locally

Generate an SVG file:

./character-sheet-generator random > test.svg

Run a web service at localhost:3040:

make run

Face Generator

You can run the Face Generator and use its faces. Check it out and run it locally.

make run

It runs on port 3020. Change the local config file for the Character Sheet Generator and add the Face Generator URL:

{
  loglevel => 'info',
  contrib => 'share',
  face_generator_url => "http://localhost:3020",
}

Now you can start the Character Sheet Generator and it uses the images generated by the running Face Generator.

make run

For production you would of course not use "localhost" for the URL, but the actual URL where Face Generator is available.

Note that if you install the character sheet generator on a website using HTTPS, then you have to install the face generator in the same domain, because browsers refuse to download images from a different domain when using HTTPS.

Posting 20 Characters to Campaign Wiki

Example (English & German):

#!/bin/bash
for i in $(seq 10); do
  for lang in de en; do
    f=$(mktemp /tmp/char.XXXX)
    echo "Character:" > $f
    character-sheet-generator random $lang text >> $f
    echo >> $f
    name=$(grep name: $f | cut -c 7-)
    class=$(grep class: $f | cut -c 8-)
    if curl --head --silent "https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/MontagInZ%c3%bcrich/$name" | grep --silent "^HTTP/1.1 404"; then
	echo "|[[$name]] |    0|    0|$class 1 |– |no player |"
	wikiput -u Alex -z frodo -s "New character" "https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/MontagInZ%c3%bcrich/$name" < $f
	sleep 1
    else
	echo $name already exists
    fi
  done
done

This uses wikiput to do the actual posting instead of curl because I've been getting a timeout error when posting to the wiki using curl.

Dependencies

The CGI script depends on Mojolicious and some other Perl modules. You can install everything via cpan or cpanm, or if you're on a Debian system, try the following:

sudo apt-get install git libmodern-perl-perl \
  libmojolicious-perl libi18n-acceptlanguage-perl \
  libfile-sharedir-perl libfile-slurper-perl \
  libxml-libxml-perl

Development

If you want to tinker with the code, use morbo to run the application because that restarts the application every time you make a change.

morbo script/character-sheet-generator

Production

This runs the script as a server on port 8080, writing a pid file:

hypnotoad script/character-sheet-generator

Whenever you repeat this hypnotoad command, the server will be restarted. There's no need to kill it.

You can configure hypnotoad to listen on a different port by adding an additional item to the config file, character-sheet-generator.conf. Here's an example:

{
  hypnotoad => {listen => ['http://*:8083'],},
}

This is great for production. If you have multiple Mojolicious applications, you can either run them all with their own Hypnotoad, or you can use Toadfarm.

Docker

Quickstart

If you don’t know anything about Docker, this is how you set it up.

# install docker on a Debian system
sudo apt install docker.io
# add the current user to the docker group
sudo adduser $(whoami) docker
# if groups doesn’t show docker, you need to log in again
su - $(whoami)

Running the latest Character Sheet Generator

There is a Dockerfile in the repository. Check out the repository, change into the working directory, and build a docker image, tagging it test/character-sheet-generator:

git clone https://alexschroeder.ch/cgit/character-sheet-generator
cd character-sheet-generator
docker build --tag test/character-sheet-generator .

If you remove the --notest argument in the Dockerfile, this is a good way to check for missing dependencies. 😁

To run the application on it:

docker run --publish=3020:3020 --publish=3040:3040 test/character-sheet-generator

This runs the web application in the container and has it listen on http://127.0.0.1:3040 – and you can access it from the host.