Guide on how to do common tasks on this website.
Here are some general guidelines to follow when making changes.
The website is published from the main
branch, which is considered “production”. The main
branch
is the only “long-lived” permanent branch. Temporary branches should be created from main
, and used for fixes or feature
changes. Read more about Git branches here.
A branch enables isolation of the change while its being worked on. So if you’re working on a big change but haven’t completed it yet, you can still make a critical fix on a separate branch and merge it - without having to worry about finishing the change or undoing it.
Your first step - prior to making or committing any changes - should be to make a new branch.
Reviews make sure things look right - or at least that people understand what’s going on.
Once you’re done (or nearly done) with making changes on a branch, then you’re ready to create a Pull Request
to request that the changes on that branch be merged to the main
production branch.
A Pull Request is another name for a change request - it originated with the open source community, but is now used for any type of request where a change is being reviewed prior to integration into the primary branch.
Once the changes are reviewed and merged, the Pull Request can be merged to the main
branch and closed, and
the branch deleted.
Small, simple changes to a few files can be easily made through the GitHub.com web interface. First, find the file
you want to edit. Then click the ‘Edit’ button (pencil) to make changes to the file in-line. When done, click the
Commit Changes
button and create a new branch. Giving the branch a name like add-vendor-links
helps you and others
keep track of the branch intent.
Larger changes - such as moving files around - requires more testing and experimentation. You’ll want to clone the
repository to your local computer, make changes, test them out, then finally commit them. You can use GitHub Desktop
to do the clone - download it here. For making the changes, Microsoft VSCode is a free
and popular editor - you can download it here.
Testing the website locally can be accomplished by installing Ruby and the Jekyll package for Ruby. See the GitHub docs on how to build and test using Jekyll locally.
When changes are merged to the main
branch, the GitHub Actions workflow
automatically kicks in and uploads / updates the website. You can see the progress of the upload via the Actions
tab under this
repository. The job takes about 15 minutes to complete. Any errors are showin the Actions
tab.
The Launch Schedule is present on the main page as its the one used most frequently.
_pages/index.md
page and edit it.This information should be posted on the main page in two places:
_pages/index.md
page and edit it.After a launch is complete, we like to post photos online for members to share.
Clone the repository to your local computer. You can edit and upload files via the Web UI, but larger changes usually are much easier with a local copy. You can use GitHub Desktop to clone the repository, and VSCode to edit text files.
Create a new directory under assets/images/galleries
with the date in yyyy-mm-dd
(year-month-day) name format.
Copy each image and its thumbnail into the new directory. The expected image format is ii_yy-mm-dd.jpg
(index_year-month-day) and ii_TN_yy-mm-dd.jpg
.
Run the powershell script scripts\Create-ImageGalleryMarkdown.ps1
in PowerShell to create a Markdown (.md)
file under _launch_pictures
.
Create a branch via GitHub Desktop. Then, still in GitHub Desktop, add the new image files (including thumbnails) and new MarkDown file, and commit.
Push the branch up to GitHub.com and create a Pull Request.
Once all comments are addressed, merge the Pull Request. The changes will be shown in the website after deployment. If the changes break something, you will see a red X next to the Pull Request.