RethinkDB website

Building the website

Note: Before you can build the website, make sure your system is ready; read the "Getting your system ready to build the website" section.

We use Jekyll to build the website. To setup, build, and deploy the website, you will use a series of rake tasks.

The website relies on an external repository (rethinkdb/docs), which is managed by the rake tasks.

First-time setup

Start by cloning this repository:

git clone git@github.com:rethinkdb/www.git

Before you can build the site, you need to install required dependencies with Bundler, and initialize external repositories:

rake init

Build and serve the website

To build and serve the site:

rake

Other operations

• rake -T: see the complete list of rake tasks
• rake up: quickly serve the site (this skips the initial build)
• rake pull: update external git repositories
• rake build: builds the website (outputs to _site)
• rake clean: remove all generated directories and reset the site
• rake serve: serve the development locally with hot reloading
• rake pyserve: serve the development locally with python without hot reloading

Getting your system ready to build the website

This guide steps through how to build the website, assuming you have no tools installed. It describes:

• Setting up Homebrew
• Installing Node.js / nvm
• Installing Ruby / rbenv / Bundler

Remember: if you update your path at any point in this guide, start a new Bash sesion or run (on OS X):

source ~/.bash_profile

Set up Homebrew

ruby <(curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)

Append this to your path to use binaries installed by Homebrew:

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"

Update Homebrew formulae:

brew update

Install nvm to manage Node.js version (using v0.39.7 in this case):

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

Tell nvm to install the latest LTS version of Node.js (in this case, 18)

nvm install 18

Set the default version of Node.js:

nvm alias default 18

Install rbenv to manage Ruby versions:

brew install rbenv ruby-build v8

Add this to your path: Uses Homebrew's directories rather than ~/.rbenv:

export RBENV_ROOT=~/.rbenv
export RUBY_CONFIGURE_OPTS="--with-openssl-dir=$(brew --prefix openssl@1.1)"

Add this to your path: enable shims and autocompletions for rbenv:

if which rbenv > /dev/null; then eval "$(rbenv init -)"; fi

Install the latest version of Ruby 3.2.x (in this case, 3.2.2)

rbenv install -s 3.2.2

Set the Ruby version to be the global default

rbenv global 3.2.2
rbenv rehash

Update to the latest verion of Rubygems:

gem update --system

Install Bundler:

gem install bundler

Configure Bundler for faster, paralleized gem installation. First, find out the number of cores on your system (on OS X):

sysctl -n hw.ncpu

Then, configure Bundler to use n-1 cores, where n is the number of cores on your system (in this case, 4 cores):

bundle config --global jobs 3

Now, ensure you're in the root directory of the git repo and run:

rake init

You can test that everything was successful by trying to build the site:

rake serve

Deploying

We are automatically deploying to Netlify. This means, whenever a pull request is merged, after the successulf build, the new version of the site will be available.

Note: A preview site will be generated for every pull request.