caseywatts/codefordc-2.0

The current Code for DC website

Code For DC Website

This is the repository for the website for Code for DC, the DC chapter of the Code for America Brigade program.

This site is built on Github pages and uses Jekyll for its blog.

Contributing

If you want to make a blog post: read this.

If you want to add a project to the projects page: read this.

For everything else:

First, make sure that you have git on your computer. Create your own fork of the repository, then clone it to your computer:

git clone [email protected]:[YOUR GITHUB NAME]/codefordc-2.0.git

You can work on the master branch (which is the default), but it's preferable to set up a new branch if you're working on a specific feature:

git checkout -b [NEW BRANCH NAME]

Next, you'll want to view the site locally using jekyll. There are two ways to do this:

Less steps, but more points of failure

Make sure that you have Ruby installed on your system.

If you do, try this:

gem install jekyll #sudo is probably required
jekyll serve -w

Hopefully it works! If not and you see something like jekyll: command not found, you'll need to add the jekyll executable's location to your shell's $PATH variable. Here's an example of how that might work, but you should do some Googling to understand what you're doing here:

gem which jekyll
# /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.3/gems/jekyll-2.4.0/lib/jekyll.rb
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.3/gems/jekyll-2.4.0/bin
jekyll serve -w

Point your browser to 0.0.0.0:4000. As you can see, this is a bit of a hacky workaround. If you upgrade Ruby in the future, be aware that this might get confusing as you add more gems.

More steps, but more likely to work

A more elegant solution is to use a Ruby manager. Both rbenv and RVM are popular, but this example will use the former for its simplicity. Install it, making sure to set up the init script and restart your shell. This may take some effort, but will allow you to manage multiple versions of Ruby and their various dependencies across projects (this is a common problem in Rubyland).

Then:

rbenv install 2.1.1
gem install bundler
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve -w

Point your browser to 0.0.0.0:4000.