developers.italia.it)

The website of the developer community designing and developing public digital services in Italy.

The website is developed using Jekyll and it's currently served through GitHub pages.

A CircleCI job builds the sources and commits the resulting artifacts to GitHub, in the docs folder. The same job is also triggered every night to get the most updated data feeding the website.

Development

A development environment can be both brought up directly on the developer machine and in form of a Docker container.

The same commands -run in the Dockerfile- can also be run directly on the developer machine.

The docker-compose.yml file leverages some environment variables that should be declared in an .env file, located in the root of this repository. A .env.example file has some exemplar values. Before proceeding, copy the .env.example into .env and modify the environment variables as needed.

Then, build the container, running:

docker-compose up [-d] [--build]

where:

-d execute the containers in background
--build forces the containers build

To destroy the containers, use:

docker-compose down

Wait until the Docker logs explicitly say that the website is served on 0.0.0.0:4000. Then, open a browser and navigate to http://localhost:4000 to preview the website.

Recompile handlebars templates

Within folder _templates live some handlebars templates that operate in various areas. Once they get modified it is necessary recompile them. To do that we can use npx utility as follow:

npx handlebars@4.0.0 _templates/search.handlebars -f assets/templates/search.tpl.js

Makefile

Both the CircleCI build and the Docker files leverage a Makefile, facilitating the execution of more complex routines. You can have a look at the Makefile to know more about the exact commands used to build the website.

Environment variables

Some environment variables change the behavior of different aspects of your build/execution:

ELASTICSEARCH_URL: the full Elasticsearch URL prefixed by the HTTP schema (http:// - https://). This is optional. If not set, Jekyll will exclude the Searchyll integration from the build. The variable is left empty by default in the .env.example file
ELASTICSEARCH_USER: the Elasticsearch username. This is optional and not set by default, as not all Elasticsearch servers authenticate users
ELASTICSEARCH_PASS: the Elasticsearch password. This is optional and not set by default, as not all Elasticsearch servers authenticate users
GITHUB_ACCESS_TOKEN: the optional GitHub access token to gain unlimited access GitHub API. Access tokens are associated with the Italia GitHub account.
JEKYLL_ENV: can be set either to development (default) or production. The latter minifies and optimizes the build artifacts
NOKOGIRI_USE_SYSTEM_LIBRARIES: can be either set to true or false. You usually want to set this to true (default). The Nokogiri documentation mentions that this allows to use the OS libxml2 and libxslt libraries, instead of using the Nokogiri ones

License