A personal website of miscellany: http://dansmith65.com.

Build Notes

I don't add to my blog often, so I'm likely to forget all this stuff if I don't record it somewhere. I plan to re-read this every 6 months or so to remind myself wtf I was thinking...

Am using https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/ as a guide for using npm as a build tool. Prior to making this change, I used a _build.cmd file to set a few environment variables, then call jekyll build. I also used _serve.cmd to run jekyll serve, which was just a handy way to open a new terminal and serve the site while testing locally.

That method was sufficient for starting out, but then I added validate-tags.txt and validate-years.txt. Both of those could produce a list of tags or years that need files created for them for the blog to work properly. Since I didn't have a build process, I couldn't parse the output of those files and automatically create the necessary files. Instead, I resorted to triggering a build error so I knew to find out what the missing tags/years are and manually create the files. Between this, and wanting to start adding images to by blog, I started looking into build processes and settled on npm-scripts.

Relevant npm commands:

• npm install to install dependencies (also seems to update dependencies)
• npm start alias to npm run start, builds/serves/watches for changes
• npm run build builds the site and validates tags/years files
• npm run env built-in command that lists environment variables available to the script at runtime
• refer to "scripts" in package.json for additional commands that can be called via npm run [script]
• npm run serve:dev and npm run build:dev can currently be used to reference source js instead of minified. I can reference the jekyll.environment Liquid tag anywhere I want development-specific output.

Updating dependencies:

• use https://github.com/ccmywish/rbenv-for-windows to manage Ruby versions
  • rbenv update
  • rbenv install VERSION
    • if rbenv doesn't include a new version of ruby; add it to rbenv\share\versions.txt, then it can be installed
  • rbenv local VERSION
• bundle update --bundler to update the version required in Gemfile.lock
• bundle update
  • info on managing local github-pages install: https://github.com/github/pages-gem
• might also need to run gem update, or something similar:
  • gem update bundler
  • gem update --system
• npm outdated to see if packages can/should be updated
• npm update to update all

If I have compatibility issues with old versions of code supported by Github Pages, consider https://github.com/BryanSchuetz/jekyll-deploy-gh-pages

Starefossen/docker-github-pages#74

Pictures

Node script in this repo will process source images, creating multiple copies as needed for this blog. Source images are defined as a list of paths (on my local system) in a text file like: _data/pictures/2018/motorcycle-rebuild-xs1100.txt. Where "2018" is the year from the post, and "motorcycle-rebuild-xs1100" is the post slug. Each line can contain one of three values: a file path, a gallery name prefixed with "#", or blank which will be skipped. Once a file is created, npm run process-pictures will read that file and put the resulting pictures in assets/pictures/2018/motorcycle-rebuild-xs1100. To include those pictures in the post, use: {% include picture-gallery.html gallery="" %}, where gallery can be empty to include the images that were not part of a gallery, or the gallery name. The process-pictures script will create a json file that is used by the include to get the path to/sizes of pictures. If you update the source txt file, all the pictures and the json file will automatically be re-created. Similarly, if the json file is deleted, all pictures and the json file will be re-created. Because of this automatic creation proces, both the _data/pictures/ and the assets/pictures/ folders should probably not be used for anything other than pictures managed automatically by this script.

Jekyll Front Matter

variable	description
comments_locked	true or false, default = false, Set to true to prevent additional comments. explanation
last_modified_at	add when modifying a post, timestamp in format: 2017-03-25T12:38:13-07:00 (use dt2` phrase)