This is the source code for the website for the Laboratory for Software Design at Iowa State University. This site is hosted at http://design.cs.iastate.edu.
The site is built using Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. Jekyll builds HTML+CSS sites from HTML, Markdown, CSS, and SCSS augmented by the Liquid template language.
To build the site, you will need the jekyll command. These instructions
suggest that you use Bundler, the standard Ruby dependency manager, to obtain
and invoke jekyll. Bundler can be obtained by running gem install bundler.
Then, an appropriate version of Jekyll (and any other ruby-based build
dependencies) can be installed with bundle install.
(For more background on Bundler, see their website, particularly the rationale page.)
We should now be able to use the following command to invoke our bundler-managed version of Jekyll. Build the site by running the following command from the root of the repository:
$ bundle exec jekyll build
The output of this build should appear in the _site/ directory.
For iterative development, we can use Jekyll's serve subcommand to perform
incremental compilation as we make changes and to host the resulting site on
localhost:
$ bundle exec jekyll serve
Currently, the site is deployed by pushing the built website to the pyrite
server. This can be done by invoking the _scripts/deploy/manually.sh script
from the root of this repository.
Note that one can only access pyrite if one is either on campus or using the
ISU VPN. Additionally, one will only be able to push to the deployment folder
on pyrite if one has appropriate UNIX permissions on that machine. Ask Dr.
Rajan if you need to be given such permissions. At the moment, he would likely
forward you to Dean, who will likely add you to the coms-design UNIX group.
In the future, we may use a continuous deployment solution, but that is not yet implemented.