Switch over to GitHub Pages + Jekyll

[fgrehm]

Hey @garethr,

As I told you on twitter, I did a 2 hours spike on porting the website to Jekyll so that we can use GitHub pages. The code is available at https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrantboxes-gh-pages, is live at http://fgrehm.github.io/vagrantboxes-gh-pages/ and I'm creating this issue so that we can discuss the move :-)

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Here's a list of some pain points we experience with the current approach that I believe can be solved with the move:

• Boxes are automatically ordered by name
• Reduce the chances of a PR conflict by having base boxes "metadata" on separate files
• Stop relying on Travis / Heroku (GitHub takes care of deployment and hosting for us ;)
• Although I haven't tried, I'm pretty sure this will open up for us to write a Ruby script that interacts with the Jekyll API to gather base boxes metadata and identifies broken links.

So, if we decide to switch over to that approach, here's a few things we'll need to think about:

• Is there any extra metadata we want around? There's an intention of keeping track of the users who submitted the box to display on the website. If there's something else we want to keep track of this is the time to introduce them.
• Can we make the "last updated at" date dynamic? I always forget to update it and if we are able to somehow fetch that from git commits or from the base boxes "posts" it would be just great.
• What should we do about the current PRs that are open? IMHO we should just close the PR and ask the contributor to submit a new one using the new format as I don't believe it is worth the trouble to deal with a whole bunch of conflicts that will show up.

There are also a couple things that I can't take care from my side. Namely switching the project's default branch to gh-pages and updating DNS entries.

I think that's it, I hope you like it and I'll let you know if I end up remembering something else :-)

[fgrehm]

Oh, I remembered that there was an issue around about implementing a filter by distro and config management tools so I updated the script to import the current boxes to take care of that :-) the actual filtering is not in place but it shouldn't be that hard for someone to implement it with some JS magic :-P

[willian]

👍

[troydm]

nice work!

[miurahr]

👍

[miurahr]

fgrehm/vagrantboxes-gh-pages#1
Here is a JS filter feature.

[JonTheNiceGuy]

Does this work in the same way as #29 or different? I think we're nearly at the point where all the outstanding PRs are merged, so we should be good to go within a couple of weeks?

[fgrehm]

@JonTheNiceGuy is similar in spirit, the difference is that I used GitHub pages and it won't require any manual intervention for publishing as GitHub will take care of that for us ;-)

I think we're nearly at the point where all the outstanding PRs are merged, so we should be good to go within a couple of weeks?

Yeah, I just hope that code and the scripts I used to "import" current boxes are still working ;-)

[casr]

I just came across this but I made something similar a while back where I was experimenting with just my boxes to begin with. I spent most of my time thinking about what I thought a flexible syntax for the “posts” might be – otherwise it's pretty similar to this!

Post example, the repo and website/output.