StanfordASL

The ASL's website, hosted on GitHub Pages!

System Setup

Before developing/publishing the website, you may need to install various system dependencies, specifically rake (a build automation tool) and bundler (a Ruby dependency manager, which will install all further dependencies listed in Gemfile). On a Ubuntu system, installing these dependencies looks something like

sudo apt install rake ruby-dev
sudo gem install bundler

And then cd into where you cloned this repository and run the following to install website dependencies with bundler

bundle config set --local path 'vendor/bundle'
bundle install

Local Developement

To preview the website on your local machine, run

rake preview

To build locally, run

rake build  # this run the same build command as the Github action server

Normally you shouldn't need to perform local build, but in case you get CI errors on Github, this would be useful for debugging any build errors.

Publishing the Website

The main branch is protected, so you won't be able to push directly to it. This mechanism is useful for preventing people from breaking the website silently, and fixing / reverting broken commits for other people is no fun.

In order to update the website content, you need to make changes in a seperate branch and create a pull request. If you are unfamilier with the PR workflow, you can follow the steps below:

1. Create a new branch

   git checkout -b <branch_name>

   replacing <branch_name> with an actual branch name, e.g. alvin/some_feature.

2. Make changes to the website, and test run it with rake preview.

3. Commit your changes and push to the new branch

   git commit -m "added site x" && git push -u origin <branch_name>

   Note: modify the commit message to something related to your change

4. Create a PR from the Github project page following the prompt on the top of the page.

5. Go to the PR page and find your PR. Wait for a few minutes for the CI checks to pass (there will be a ✅ on the bottom of the PR page if all checks pass). Then you can press the merge button to deploy your changes. If the CI checks did not pass, you can click into the failed checks to see what happened.

NOTE: This GitHub Pages link is where the asl.stanford.edu and asl-origin.stanford.edu proxies point to, so this repository and the corresponding GitHub Page is the "actual" website.