Any changes made to the master branch of this repository will automatically be deployed to silc.ccs.neu.edu. The recommended workflow for major changes is to thus do work on a branch (or a fork) and then, via a pull request, get feedback and merge to master. But, for small things changing directly on the master branch is fine.
The deployment is orchestrated by the .travis.yml script and deploy.sh.
(Where the former invokes the latter). The secret block in the former is an
encrypted login token for an silc-bot user that has write access to the
artifact repository (silcgroup.github.io), and no other access. Note that this
is the same setup used for deployment of prl.ccs.neu.edu.
This is a statically generated site. The code that controls the generation is in
site.hs, and if you want to build it locally, install stack and then run
site.hs watch as a script (i.e., on the command-line ./site.hs watch) -- it
will download the haskell compiler, all needed libraries, and run it. The first
time, this may take a while! The watch command has it automatically serve the
website at http://localhost:8000 and rebuild whenever you make changes. You
can also run ./site.hs build and open the files in the _site directory
directly, and you can run ./site.hs clean to get rid of all the built
artifacts (the most likely reason to do this is if you have changed the
generating code in site.hs but haven't changed any of the source files, so the
dependency management won't realize it should rebuild stuff).
The main pages are either markdown files you can edit directly (e.g.,
index.markdown or projects.markdown) or they are files that are generated
from a data file in YAML format (i.e., publications.yaml, people.yaml).
Changing any of these source files will cause the corresponding page to be
regenerated.
Every page uses templates from the templates directory. The base.html
template is used for everything, and the publications.html and people.html
templates are used to build those pages respectively, using the data from the
corresponding YAML file.
Any file in static or css will be copied over as-is, so you can add or
change things there directly.
Ideally, most changes will not require any changes to the site generator
(site.hs), but if they do, here is some advice. This site is built using
Hakyll, which is a static site generator written in Haskell. The main block
is what drives the generator, by matching particular source files and then
describing how they are built into output artifacts.
Some of these are simple, like the files in static, where everything is just
copied verbatim. The markdown files are slightly more complicated, because we
want the urls to look like "/projects", which means we actually generate
"/projects/index.html", and we do that using pandoc (which can turn almost any
text format into almost any other one, in this case we are just dealing with
markdown but we could switch that if people prefer!).
The YAML files are more complicated, because we have to parse the files into
data types (which are defined at the bottom of the file), and then define
template Context fields for the template (in particular, we make a
listField, which is then used in a template as $for(field_name)$, and we
have to then give it the context to use for each item, which has the fields of
each item that we parsed).