dominikbernhardt / gapwww

Source for the GAP website

GapWWW

This is the source repository for the GAP website https://www.gap-system.org.

The GAP website is NOT hosted on GitHub pages, and therefore there is NO branch named gh-pages here. We host it elsewhere, but we use GitHub for collaborative work on the website. We welcome contributions ranging from fixed typos and updated details to suggestions regarding the structure of the website and its improved look.

For small improvements (e.g. correcting details and fixing typos), the procedure is as simple as just submitting an issue or pull request here. Please take into account that some files, in particular package YAML files Packages/<pkgname>.html are generated automatically from the metadata in PackageInfo.g files. Incorrect information there should not be changed via pull requests, but reported to package authors instead. In doubt, please submit an issue before making a pull request, and we will be able to advise on further steps.

For larger changes, it will be useful to build a local version of the GAP website first. This requires use of Jekyll.

Actually publishing changes to the website

After a change has been committed this repository, currently one needs to manually get the change onto the website. This can be done as follows:

1. ssh into gap-web.host.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk (requires an account in St Andrews)

2. for a test deployment (recommended), first cd test.gap-system.org (then the update will be published on https://test.gap-system.org), otherwise cd www.gap-system.org

3. run git up (an alias we configured there for git pull --ff-only)

4. run jekyll build

That's it.

Warning about package manuals

Note that the Manuals directory is not in this git repository, as it is too large (about XXX GB of data). This is why they are only on the server, in the directory ~/www.gap-system.org/Manuals (so be very careful never to delete that!). To get them to appear in the right place on the website (they don't automatically, as they are not in the ~/www.gap-system.org/_site directory), we configured nginx to put them there, via /host/gap-web/nginx.d/www.gap-system.org/_global.conf

Tweaking the server config

In general, config files for the nginx web server are in /host/gap-web/nginx.d/ E.g. in /host/gap-web/nginx.d/www.gap-system.org.

You need to read up about nginx config syntax if you want to fully master these, but for basic things it usually suffices to look at the existing config files and one can often guess what they do.

After you make a config change it won't have any effect immediately. You need to tell nginx to reload its config. But first, validate it for syntax errors:

nginx -c /host/gap-web/nginx.conf -t

If that worked, reload the config:

nginx -c /host/gap-web/nginx.conf -s reload