Local Build Process: Take out the bumps.

dmsnell commented 9 years ago

When I started to try and get this site going on my machine I discovered that it's pretty hard to setup correctly. A few of the issues with hosting on GitHub Pages and Jekyll collided leading to some funky instructions for doing local dev: commenting out variables in the build config and also in CSS files. This process was a bit fragile with regards to accidentally deploying changes that could take down the production site.

Now, the build process has changed by the introduction of some automatic variables that setup the environment in place of the developer.

If the changes are accidentally deployed, they will reflect the proper production environment.
Building locally required appending a local config file to the Jekyll process: jekyll serve --config _config.yml, _config_local.yml --baseurl '' --watch
The appropriate base url for CSS purposes has been moved to a template variable in style.css
There is a new template variable, production, available which holds true for production builds and false for development builds, as specified by the inclusion of the local config file.

The local config file does not replace _config.yml, but merely redefines a few variables, so both are needed.

I have also updated README.md to reflect these changes. Along the way there were a few updates, such as using the github-pages gem instead of installing all the dependencies separately.

Additionally I have linked some git tutorials in case this is all very unfamiliar to some contributors.

dmsnell commented 9 years ago

To test:

git clone https://github.com/CodeForTucson/codefortucson-site.git
git checkout enhance/local-dev-process
make
[open browser to http://localhost:4000]

Update: After the Makefile commit I have updated the testing instructions to reflect the fact that you no longer need to run Jekyll manually with the proper switches, but can instead run a simple make from the project root to start the local server.

meiqimichelle commented 9 years ago

Thank you @dmsnell this is beautiful :dancer: :dancer: :dancer:

CodeForTucson / codefortucson-site

Local Build Process: Take out the bumps. #38