justgrimes/pages

Webhook for automatically generating 18F sites a la GitHub pages

18F Pages

This repo contains tools and instructions to generate Jekyll-based 18F sites automatically from GitHub repositories in a similar fashion to GitHub pages.

Pages will appear on https://pages.18f.gov/$REPO-NAME, where $REPO-NAME is the name of the site repository on https://github.com/18F/. The status of the most recent build attempt will be visible at https://pages.18f.gov/$REPO-NAME/build.log.

Publishing to pages.18f.gov

When to use this technique

The one condition test: "Is this site going to be for public (non-18F) consumption? If yes, use pages.18F.gov."

Adding a new site

In a nutshell, for each site repo:

• In _config.yml, set baseurl: to /$REPO-NAME.
• Create an 18f-pages branch. If you already have a gh-pages branch, you can do this on the command line via:

$ git checkout -b 18f-pages gh-pages
$ git push origin 18f-pages

• If your repo is primarily a Jekyll site (as opposed to a project site with an 18f-pages branch for documentation), you may optionally set the default branch on GitHub to 18f-pages.
• Set a webhook for https://pages.18f.gov/deploy. When doing this using the repo settings on github.com, https://pages.18f.gov/deploy should be used for the Payload URL and the rest of the fields can stay with their defaults.
• Push a change to the 18f-pages branch to publish your site.
• Optional: Add your site's title: and url: (relative to https://pages.18f.gov, e.g. /guides) to the sites: list at the top of index.html in this repo. You can use the GitHub editing interface to do this.

For more complete instructions, see the 18F Guides Template, especially the Post Your Guide section.

Staging area

Any changes pushed to a 18f-pages-staging branch will appear on https://pages-staging.18f.gov, which requires authenticated access.

Administering pages.18f.gov

Starting the webhook daemon

To start the Hookshot server as a daemon using Forever:

• Clone this repository on your local machine.
• Install pip if needed.
• Install Fabric via pip install fabric.
• Add the following stanza to $HOME/.ssh/config, replacing $HOME with the full path to your home directory:

Host 18f-pages
   Hostname pages.18f.gov
   User ubuntu
   IdentityFile $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa
   IdentitiesOnly yes

• Run ssh 18f-pages git clone [email protected]:18F/pages.git to clone this repository in the $HOME directory on pages.18f.gov.
• Launch the remote daemon by running fab start in the root directory of this repository.

For grotty details on how to set up Hookshot, Fabric, and Forever, see the 18F Hub deploy/README instructions.

Nginx config

The following excerpts are extacted from the 18F Hub nginx configuration.

Webhook:

location /deploy {
  proxy_pass http://localhost:5000/;
  proxy_http_version 1.1;
  proxy_redirect off;

  proxy_set_header Host   $host;
  proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto https;
  proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

  proxy_connect_timeout 10;
  proxy_send_timeout    30;
  proxy_read_timeout    30;
}

pages.18f.gov:

location / {
  root   /home/ubuntu/pages-generated;
  index  index.html;
  default_type text/html;
}

pages-staging.18f.gov:

location / {
  alias  /home/ubuntu/pages-staging/;
  index  index.html;
  default_type text/html;
}

Index page

pages-generated/index.html is a symlink to pages-generated/pages/index.html.

Contributing

1. Fork the repo (or just clone it if you're an 18F team member)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Feel free to ping @mbland with any questions you may have, especially if the current documentation should've addressed your needs, but didn't.

Public domain

This project is in the worldwide public domain. As stated in CONTRIBUTING:

This project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.