multigraph.org Web Site

This repository contains the source code for the http://multigraph.org web site.

To publish a change to the site, clone this repository, commit your change, and push to the master branch of the repository at https://github.com/multigraph/multigraph.github.com.

Note that the name of this repository is multigraph.github.com, which is a holdover from the days before Github moved the hosting of Github Pages from the github.com domain to the github.io domain -- if this repository were created today it would need to be named multigraph.github.io. Also note that the site actually lives at the URL http://multigraph.org, but the URLs http://multigraph.github.com and http://multigraph.github.io are both aliases for this. So a user who types http://multigraph.github.com or http://multigraph.github.io into a browser will end up at http://multigraph.org.

The site uses Github Pages for hosting, and uses the Jekyll static site generator. See https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages for more detailed instructions on how to work with a Github Pages site that uses Jekyll.

Setting Up a Working Copy

To set up a working local copy of this site that you can use for making and previewing changes locally before pushing them to the public site, first make sure you have a computer with the following required software installed:

• git

• perl; this is only necessary if you need to run the update-site script to update site content based on new commits or new releases in js-multigraph; see below for details.

• jekyll; see https://help.github.com/articles/using-jekyll-with-pages for instructions on installing Jekyll. Jekyll depends on both Ruby and Bundler, so you will need to install them as well; the instructions on Github explain how to do this.

Then, to set up a working local copy of the site, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://multigraph/multigraph.github.com

2. Install the necessary gems

   cd multigraph.github.com
   bundle install

The above steps are only needed once, to initialize a new local copy of the site.

To preview your local copy of the site in a browser, give the command

jekyll serve

Give this command in a terminal that you can leave running while you work; this command generates a copy of the site in the _site subdirectory, and starts a local web server running on port 4000. To view the site, load the URL http://localhost:4000 in a browser. (Ignore the message that Jekyll prints telling you that the server address is '0.0.0.0'.)

If you leave this jekyll serve process running, then whenever you make a change to any of the site files, jekyll will regenerate the necessary files in the _site directory automatically, and you can see the changes immediately by simply refreshing your browser window.

Note that you should not directly work with the files in the _sitedirectory, and you should definitely not commit these files to the repository. This directory is simply where the local jekyll process writes the files that it generates. When you push your changes to github, the jekyll process there generates its own copy of the pages in a different location.

Updating Content from the js-multigraph Repository

This repository contains a copy of the js-multigraph repository as a git submodule, in the lib/js-multigraph subdirectory. Some of the content on this site is generated programmatically from the contents of the js-multigraph submodule. This includes, among other things, the example graphs and the list of Multigraph releases.

To update any of these generated files, you must first initialize the git submodules in the project with the command

git submodule update --init --recursive

This is a setup step that you only need to do once after creating your copy of the repository. (Note that this is the step that creates the lib/js-multigraph directory; before doing this step, the lib subdirectory will be empty.)

After you have initialized the js-multigraph submodule, run the script

./update-site

to update everything based on the contents of the js-multigraph repo.

Note that the code in the js-multigraph submodule is not used directly on the multigraph.org web site --- in fact, it is not even included in the files hosted on the server. The update-site script takes care of copying all the needed content from the lib/js-multigraph submodule into the appropriate places in the multigraph.github.com repository.

It is only necessary to run update-site whenever the content of the js-multigraph respository has changed, such as when a new example graph has been added, or a new release has been created. If you are just making changes to the static html files on the site, you can skip the git submodule update ... and update-site steps.