staticsite

The wintersmith source for the static website

Pre-requisites

To build this site one needs wintersmith, which is a nodejs module. Install nodejs (do not install node, which is a radio package and breaks nodes modules), then run this to install wintersmith, if required:

sudo npm install wintersmith -g

Note that it will make wintersmith available on the whole system, and on the PATH. If you do not wish to do so, purse a local install.

The site is deployed with fabric, a Python software for automated deploy. Though Debian/Ubuntu packages are quite old and pip install is preferred, the script does work (at the moment) with older fabric versions.

Testing and Building the Static Site

Typing the following command will build the static site from the markdown files, and start a local web server on port 8080, localhost, serving it:

wintersmith preview

Running the following command will build the site on the build directory, which can then be used by any web server capable of serving static pages:

wintersmith build

See wintersmith help for more information.

Deploying the Site

Site deploy is done through fabric, deploying by default to web4, a staging environment. The following command will build the site (as above), generate a tarball and move it to web4:

fab pack deploy

To deploy to production, do this:

fab production pack deploy

or, if no changes were made since you last ran pack, this:

fab production deploy

See fab --list for more information.

Writing Redirects

The deploy process makes it possible to create temporary redirects. To do so, write a file called redirects.txt in this directory, containing the regular expression of the path to be redirected followed by the path or URL the client should be redirected to. For example:

^/developers(.*)$ $scheme://developers.precog.com$1

This will redirect any access to /developers -- followed by anything else -- to the site developers.precog.com, preserving whatever follows /developers, and using the same protocol (http or https), which is stored on the $scheme variable. This can have unintended consequences if, for instance, there's a /developers-review.

The exact rules are based on Nginx, which is the server that will process them, and can be found here.

Blog Redirects

The above mentioned redirects cannot redirect based on query parameters. To handle redirects from our old blog site, which was based on wordpress and, therefore, used the query parameter p to indicate which page to render, a different redirection schema was devised. This redirect is configured through the file blogredirects.txt, and consists of the value of p followed by the rediretion URL. An additional entry default is used for any page not found in the file. For example:

152     https://www.precog.com/blog/Introducing-Labcoat-by-Precog/;