CNI-Genie Website

Welcome to the repository of the public website for CNI-Genie.

We use Hugo to format and generate our website, and Netlify to manage the deployment of the site. Hugo is an open-source static site generator that provides us with templates, content organisation in a standard directory structure, and a website generation engine. You write the pages in Markdown, and Hugo wraps them up into a website.

Quickstart

Here's a quick guide to updating the docs. It assumes you're familiar with the GitHub workflow and you're happy to use the automated preview of your doc updates:

1. Fork the [cni-genie/website][cnigenie-website-repo] on GitHub.
2. Make your changes and send a pull request (PR).
3. If you're not yet ready for a review, add a comment to the PR saying it's a work in progress or add [WIP] in your PRs title. (Don't add the Hugo declarative "draft = true" to the page front matter, because that will prevent the auto-deployment of the content preview described in the next point.)
4. Wait for the automated PR workflow to do some checks. When it's ready, you should see a comment like this: deploy/netlify — Deploy preview ready!
5. Click Details to the right of "Deploy preview ready" to see a preview of your updates.
6. Continue updating your doc until you're happy with it.
7. When you're ready for a review, add a comment to the PR and assign a reviewer/approver.

Previewing your changes on a local website server

If you'd like to preview your doc updates as you work, you can install Hugo and run a local server. This section shows you how.

Install Hugo

See the Hugo installation guide. Here are some examples:

Mac OS X:

brew install hugo

Debian:

1. Download the latest Debian package from the Hugo website. For example, hugo_0.46_Linux-64bit.deb.

2. Install the package using dpkg:

   sudo dpkg -i hugo_0.46_Linux-64bit.deb
   

3. Verify your installation:

   hugo version
   

Run a local website server

Follow the usual GitHub workflow to fork the repo on GitHub and clone it to your local machine, then use your local repo as input to your Hugo web server:

1. Ensure you are in your target branch:

   git branch
   

2. Start your website server. Make sure you run this command from the /website/ directory, so that Hugo can find the config files it needs:

   hugo server -D
   

3. Your website is at http://localhost:1313/.

4. Continue with the usual GitHub workflow to edit files, commit them, push the changes up to your fork, and create a pull request. (See the GitHub workflow

5. While making the changes, you can preview them on your local version of the website at http://localhost:1313/. Note that if you have more than one local git branch, when you switch between git branches the local website reflects the files in the current branch.

Useful Hugo docs:

• Hugo installation guide
• Hugo basic usage
• Hugo site directory structure
• hugo server reference
• hugo new reference

Versioning

For each stable release, we should create a new branch for the relevant documentation. Each branch has a corresponding netlify website that automatically syncs each merged PR.

Going forward, the versioned sites should follow this convention:

• https://cnigenie.netlify.com/ always points to the current master branch
• https://master.cnigenie.netlify.com/ always points to Github head
• https://vXXX-YYY.cnigenie.netlify.com/ points to the release at vXXX.YYY-branch