armstrong.github.io

The Armstrong project website!

This is a Github Pages site. When you commit changes to master and push to the repo on Github, the files will be run through Jekyll to build the static armstrong.github.io site. We use Bower to manage our asset dependencies. Not that we have many, but Bower makes it very easy to track and update what we do use. Grunt handles the build tasks such as SASS compilation and copying over the asset files we actually need from Bower.

The file structure we have is based on the tools we use. Jekyll has its folders and Bower and NPM will have their component and module folders when you setup the site locally. Jekyll will take anything that isn't ignored and mash it together into a final _site/ folder. All of the assets we directly work with are organized in assets_src/. Grunt does some mashing of its own and puts everything in the assets/ folder. Since we never need to look in there, having one folder that everything references standarizes the code and is tidier than the common array of separate js/css/images folders.

Local development

• grunt build to run the Grunt tasks
• bundle exec jekyll serve --watch for site generation and running the server
• Browse to http://localhost:4000

Initial setup

Node.js and NPM are prerequisites. Then you'll need Grunt-CLI and Bower, which both like being globally installed (npm install -g grunt-cli bower).

From the project directory:

• npm install to install the Grunt dependencies
• bower install to install the Bower assets

To run the Github Pages version of Jekyll and thus have your local environment match Github, you'll first need Ruby and Bundler. (Here are Github's instructions.) Then from the project directory:

• bundle install

Ongoing updates

Updating assets: bower update

Updating NPM/Grunt packages: npm update

Updating Jekyll: bundle update