Saffire application

The general idea of Saffire was to have a single binary that will be able to do everything that is needed: run files, serve as fastcgi, do the REPL etc.

This is why saffire has different commands, where each command corresponds to either an internal or external command.

Internal commands

There are a few internal commands:

• saffire exec
• saffire config
• saffire fastcgi
• saffire lint
• saffire bytecode
• saffire version
• saffire help

Saffire help

Displays help information about Saffire in general, the found commands and possible options.

Saffire version

Displays current Saffire version

Saffire config

Gets or sets configuration options for saffire. This configuration is based on .ini files, and can be either global or local. This command even has the option to generate a default configuration for you.

Saffire lint

Does a lint (syntax) check on the given Saffire file.

Saffire fastcgi

Starts Saffire in FastCGI mode as a deamon so it can be used for nginx or other FastCGI capable webservers.

Saffire exec

This is the command that will run a saffire file.

This command is also the default when no command is found on the command line. This is why ./saffire test.sf is equal to ./saffire exec test.sf.

(note that because of the way Saffire deals with precompiled files, it’s possible that when executing test.sf, it really loads and executes test.sfc if present in the same directory and when it detects that this file is still “fresh”. In fact, when running ./saffire test.sf, you do not even have to have the test.sf file present in the current directory. Also, you could run ./saffire exec test.sfc to run the sfc file (and again, when not fresh, it will fall back to test.sf).

Saffire bytecode

The bytecode command deals with some internal things that can be useful on occasion. Mostly it will display information about a bytecode file (.sfc) through the subcommand info: ./saffire bytecode info test.sfc.

There is a sign and unsign subcommand that will sign and unsign bytecode with your key.

And the most important subcommand is compile, which compiles a saffire application without actually running it. There are additional options like --text, which will save a .sfa assembler output and --dot which generates a representation of the AST.

External commands

Not all commands are by default available as internal commands. It’s quite possible to have external commands that are not created as C code, but still can be useful. For instance, there is (in progress) a webserver that can serve Saffire files. With this webserver it’s quite easy to create a saffire web application without setting up Nginx and a FastCGI system. This webserver is completely written in Saffire itself.

External commands can be found on the command path (by default /usr/lib/saffire/commands), and start with saffire-<command>. Thus, the webserver would be available as /usr/lib/saffire/commands/saffire-webserver, and can be run as ./saffire webserver <webserver_options>. Saffire will automatically detect this as an external command and load the correct file.

It’s possible to not only create external commands with userland Saffire code, but even other languages, (even shell scripts) and precompiled binaries written in C.

This system is partly taken from the git ecosystem where you can easily add new features to git in pretty much the same way.

A few ideas for this could be:

• A standalone webserver (in progress)
• A package manager (./saffire package install custom/framework)
• Other tools that can come in handy while developping or using Saffire.