18F Guides Template

This is a skeleton repo containing the CFPB/DOCter-based Jekyll template for 18F Guides.

Getting started

Installing Ruby

You will need Ruby ( > version 2.1.5 ). To check whether it's already installed on a UNIX-like system, open up a terminal window (e.g. Terminal on OS X) and type ruby -v at the command prompt. For example, you should see something similar to the following:

$ ruby -v
ruby 2.2.3p173 (2015-08-18 revision 51636) [x86_64-darwin14]

If the version number is less than 2.1.5, or instead you see something like:

$ ruby -v
-bash: ruby: command not found

Then Ruby is not installed, and you should choose one of the installation methods below. The "Installing Ruby" page of the official Ruby language web site explains how to do this in a number of ways across many different systems.

Quickest Ruby install/upgrade for OS X

On OS X, you can use Homebrew to install Ruby in /usr/local/bin, which may require you to update your $PATH environment variable:

$ brew update
$ brew install ruby

Optional: using a version manager

Whether or not Ruby is already installed, we strongly recommend using a Ruby version manager such as rbenv or rvm to help ensure that Ruby version upgrades don't mean all your gems will need to be rebuilt.

Cloning and serving the Guides Template locally

To create a new guide and serve it locally, where MY-NEW-GUIDE is the name of your new repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/18F/guides-template.git MY-NEW-GUIDE
$ cd MY-NEW-GUIDE
$ ./go serve

The ./go script will check that your Ruby version is supported, install the Bundler gem if it is not yet installed, install all the gems needed by the template, and launch a running instance on http://localhost:4000/.

Follow the template instructions

The Guides Template (either running locally or the published version) will walk you through the rest of the steps to edit and publish your guide.

Staging version (for 18F team members)

In addition to the 18f-pages branch, you can create an 18f-pages-staging branch and changes to that branch will be published to https://pages-staging.18f.gov/MY-NEW-GUIDE, which is identical to https://pages.18f.gov/ but provides authenticated access.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.