Skip to content
jefmud edited this page Jan 14, 2026 · 12 revisions

Welcome to the minimus wiki!

Intent

Programming is taking a new turn as many projects focus on a variety of technologies, including web development, mobile development, development on iOS and Android, as well as traditional desktop applications. This list provides information on most of these platforms in the field of Web development. On mobile development, we show how the mobile design framework, which in turn was created by the mobile design teams, has changed and greatly evolved over the years. Web development as a whole is dominated by apps, whereas other projects focus on web design. Here we highlight a platform for app development, Minimus.

Minimus relies heavily on other projects. Probably it is closest in lineage to and is far inferior to Flask (https://github.com/pallets/flask). It is heavily influenced by Marcel Hellkamp's project Bottle (https://github.com/bottlepy). It uses approaches similar to Pyramid. And is also influenced by Ben Darnell's Tornado.

It uses the same templating language Jinja2 (https://github.com/pallets/jinja) and uses MarkupSafe.

It is powering Empress which is a CMS/Blogging engine developed for another project. Disclaimer-- it is a low traffic site run on the Twisted web project Twisted.web

Minimus Installation

You will want to create a virtual environment to keep your development separate from your default Python environment. It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to talk about virtual environments, but here are the commands

Unix/Linux commands

You can tell when you have your environment set up when you see (env) immediately preceding your shell prompt.

$ mkdir mini-projects
$ cd mini-projects
$ virtualenv --python=/usr/bin/python3 env
$ source env/bin/activate
(env) $

Setting up Minimus

(env) $ mkdir project
(env) $ cd project
(env) $ git clone https://github.com/jefmud/minimus
(env) $ pip install -r minimus/requirements.txt

Now, you are all set up for getting going with Minimus!

Manual install of Minimus

The way to get started manually is to download minimus.py and put it in the same directory as your app. Or you can use a module approach, and download the internal minimus directory that contains an __init__.py file. Either approach will get you up and running with Minimus.

Get Minimus from git clone

$ git clone https://github.com/jefmud/minimus
$ cp minimus/minimus.py your-project-dir
$ pip install Jinja2

Copy Directly from GitHub 'raw'

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jefmud/minimus/main/minimus.py

You will also need Jinja2

https://github.com/pallets/jinja

$ pip install jinja2

This will bring in Markup as well.

Now you are ready to start developing on app.py

Clone this wiki locally