Remove usage of Jekyll in favor of just HTML pages.

[rht]

No description provided.

[rht]

https://rht.github.io/zulip-archive-sample/ for a sample.

[SaschaMann]

Is there a replacement for this when using the GHA deployment method?

If I understand the docs and the action.yml correctly, there's no way to include a settings.py file to make use of settings.html_head_title as a replacement.

[rht]

Ah, right, I didn't notice. But then again, in the current master, the layouts/ dir doesn't get copied over either when executing the GHA.

I'm not entirely sure if others agree with my html_head_title implementation. They might prefer a file instead of a string. So waiting for others' opinion first.

[SaschaMann]

But then again, in the current master, the layouts/ dir doesn't get copied over either when executing the GHA.

Are you sure? We've used it to "style" the Julia archive a bit and it seems to work: _layouts/archive.html and https://juliacommunity.github.io/zulip-archive/ (View Source) (I don't know why or how that works, just that it does fwiw :D)

[rht]

Ah, right, this line does the copying:

zulip-archive/entrypoint.sh

Line 64 in d1e0bdd

cp -rf layouts/* $_layouts_path

.

Note to others: if html_head_title were an html file instead, it has a weird property that it cannot have a </html> tag, and so would be a malformed html file.

[rht]

I renamed html_head_title to page_head.

[rht]

Made a tracking issue for this request: #63.

[gasche]

I'm not entirely sure if others agree with my html_head_title implementation. They might prefer a file instead of a string. So waiting for others' opinion first.

My opinion on the PR:

• Overall this is a very nice simplification, I am strongly in favor; I'm just looking at deploying this script and the use of Jekyll adds complexity (for example: if I want to cache dependencies properly, I need to deal with two package managers, pip and gems, instead of just one; and removing Jekyll will reduce non-cached build time in the first place).
• This also looks like it simplifies the implementation (no weird generation of Markdown inside HTML stuff anymore), which is definitely a plus.
• I liked the way that the jekyll version could be customized by providing a template (layout/archive.html), and I could see people in the future hoping for more customization. Have you considered using a python Mustache implementation (I guess Mustache is the templating language that was used by Jekyll by default) to specify the page layout?

[timabbott]

Merged, huge thanks for doing this cleanup @rht! There are surely further improvements we want to make, but it seems like we'll be reasonably happy fixing forward from here.

[mattecapu]

I discovered this PR because my archive broke. Isn't there a versioning system preventing this?
Also I can't find any issue where this is discussed nor documentation on how to fix this. Any hint?

[rht]

@mattecapu you can pin your version just like how the Julia community does it: https://github.com/JuliaCommunity/zulip-archive/blob/master/.github/workflows/deploy.yml#L14.

What is your username at chat.zulip.org? We can subscribe you to a stream where we make announcements on zulip-archive.

[rht]

Seems to be working? E.g. https://mattecapu.github.io/ct-zulip-archive/stream/229111-general/topic/Dedication.html

[mattecapu]

It's not completely broken but the very few customizations I did (minimal CSS, header and footer) are gone and there's no clue on how to restore it or why they're gone.

Thanks for the tip about pinning down a version.

[gasche]

@mattecapu in my comment above I suggested a way to regain this customization back, which is to use a simple Mustache template to customize the generated HTML, instead of going through Jekyll. (In particular, we could just use a Python implementation of Mustache, instead of having to deal with two different languages, package managers, etc.) Would you be interested in looking at contributing such an extension as a new PR?

[mattecapu]

@gasche not really. I think Jekyll was a sensible choice since, afaiu, these archives are meant to be hosted on GH pages anyway.
Maybe there is a good reason to 'reinvent the wheel' by building a Mustache-based templating system is a better choice for zulip-archive, but I don't see it discussed anywhere.