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Technical Documentation

Getting started

To preview or build the website, we need to use the terminal.

Install Ruby with Rubygems, perferably with a Ruby version manager, and the Bundler gem.

In the application folder type the following to install the required gems:

bundle install

Making changes

To make changes edit the source files in the source folder.

Adding pages

All the source files can be found in the source subdirectory.

To add a new page, create a file with a .html.md extension in the /source directory.

For example, source/about.html.md will be accessible on http://localhost:4567/about.html.

A new markdown file isn't automatically included in the index. We also need to modify source/index.html.md.erb to include the addition.

Diagrams

Diagrams are generated by blockdiag from .diag source files in source/diagrams/.

To regenerate the diagrams:

  • run make from the source/diagrams directory
  • preview the diagram
  • commit the changes to the SVG file

If you've added a new diagram, you'll need to edit source/diagrams/Makefile.

Preview

Whilst writing documentation we can run a middleman server to preview how the published version will look in the browser. After saving a change the preview in the browser will automatically refresh.

The preview is only available on our own computer. Others won't be able to access it if they are given the link.

Type the following to start the server:

bundle exec middleman server

If all goes well something like the following output will be displayed:

== The Middleman is loading
== LiveReload accepting connections from ws://192.168.0.8:35729
== View your site at "http://Laptop.local:4567", "http://192.168.0.8:4567"
== Inspect your site configuration at "http://Laptop.local:4567/__middleman", "http://192.168.0.8:4567/__middleman"

You should now be able to view a live preview at http://localhost:4567.

Build and deploy

If you want to publish the website without using a build script you may need to build the static HTML files.

Type the following to build the HTML:

bundle exec middleman build

This will create a build subfolder in the application folder which contains the HTML and asset files ready to be published.

The team manual is hosted on GitHub Pages which is deployed using GitHub actions. GitHub pages is configured with a custom sub-domain of team-manual.cloud.service.gov.uk.

The deploy process first runs bundle exec middleman build which generates a build directory consisting of static files for our site.

Next the upload-pages-artifact action takes the build directory and turns it into a gzip archive called github-pages which the deploy-pages action uses to deploy to GitHub pages.