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📚 Nottingham New Theatre History Project

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The history project collects and publishes information on past shows, committees and other goings-on at The Nottingham New Theatre the only student run theatre in England.

We use a static site generator (Jekyll) among other tools to turn the data and website source hosted here into the website published at history.newtheatre.org.uk.

This project is run by a group from the New Theatre's Alumni Network.

📜 Working with the Repo

There are 2 common ways to use this repository:

  1. Adding content (shows, people, etc)
  2. Editing the site (templates, plugins, etc)

1. 📝 Adding & Editing Content

You can do this primarily in one of two ways: using the GitHub web interface (good for very minor tweaks); or by editing the files on your computer.

The site's Contributor's Guide has all the information you need for this.

You'll be able to see the changes you make when you open a Pull Request with our Deploy Previews. If you'd like to see your changes locally, keep scrolling.

2. 💻 Editing the Site Code

If you're editing templates, plugins, and so on, you likely want to be able to view your changes and test them locally before you push.

The first thing you'll need to do is clone (download) the repo onto your computer. You can do this a variety of ways, the easiest are either downloading the zip or using the following command, providing you have Git installed:

git clone https://github.com/newtheatre/history-project.git

You can then either use Docker, or build the site yourself to see your changes.

To save your changes back to GitHub, you will need to use a Git client, which you can do from the command line, or download and use a graphical one. We recommend GitHub Desktop or GitKraken.

🐳 Using Docker

Docker is a cross platform software container platform. Following these instructions will allow you to build and view the site on your local machine in an environment as close to the production system as possible.

<details> <summary><strong>ℹ️ Extra steps for Windows users</strong></summary> You will need to install WSL first, by doing the following:

You may then need to reboot.

</details>

Setting up Docker

Once everything has finished running, you should see the site at http://localhost:8000. Hit <kbd>ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>c</kbd> to stop the server. If using 'Docker Toolbox' and localhost doesn't work, you can find the IP address of the virtual machine by running echo " $(docker-machine ip default)"

By default ./run_dev.sh uses the parameters start install build test serve in that order.

You can add/remove steps to ./run_dev as needed. For example, there is no need to run start or install every time you want to build the site.

Environment variables (such as the Smugmug API key) can be changed by modifying the ENV lines in the Dockerfile (and then running start again).

🛠 Building the site (without Docker)

To get the site running locally you will need:

We'll get that sorted, then install the project.

We don't recommend doing it this way on vanilla Windows, though if you use the WSL you can follow the Ubuntu instructions.

1. Setting up your system

<details> <summary>Ubuntu</summary> </details> <details> <summary>macOS</summary> For ease, we recommend installing Homebrew. </details>

2. Project Install

3. Run

ℹ️ If gulp commands don't work ('build' is not in your gulpfile), try using node_modules/.bin/gulp (eg node_modules/.bin/gulp build) instead.

To get more verbose output from Jekyll, run export JEKYLL_LOG_LEVEL=debug before building.

🧪 Testing

After building the site you can run the test suite with gulp test. Currently we test for bad links, valid image tags, script references and the validity of site JSON feeds.

Bear in mind you may want to disable htmltest's external link checking as this may take some time on a consumer internet connection.

You may also test the syntax of YAML front-matter via gulp yamllint.

Branches pushed to the GitHub repo are have preview builds deployed on Netlify, you can find links to the most recent ones here: https://app.netlify.com/sites/history-project-dev/deploys.

📷 Asset Storage

All photographs, image assets, and videos under 20 minutes in length are stored using the theatre's SmugMug.

Other binary assets are stored under assets/ using Git LFS. This separates these large files from the main repository. If you do not have LFS set up on your machine please do not attempt to commit assets as this would bloat the repository.

💌 Special Thanks

📋 Licence

This project as a whole isn't particularly helpful for other organizations, what we're doing here can be described as coding in the open, rather than building an open source project. That said parts of the project may be of interest or use to others. This repository is a mix of source and content, as such there are two licences that apply.