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Contributing to the MacRuby website

By Mike Sassak

Contributing to the MacRuby website is an easy way to give back to the project. This tutorial will tell you everything you need to get started by showing you how to grab a copy of the website, build it on your local machine, add different kinds of content to it, and have your changes committed back in. But first, some guidelines.

Guidelines

  • Get in touch! Whether you have an idea of your own or simply would like to offer a hand, send a message to the mailing list. That way we can minimize the possibilities of duplicating work. You can find more information on joining the mailing list here.
  • If you’d like to post to the blog, we’re looking for major releases or announcements at the moment. More in-depth content should become tutorials or recipes. Whatever the case, if you’ve got an idea and you’re unsure of where to put it, just ask on the mailing list. If you’ve already put something up on your own blog, send us the link and we’ll be sure to fit it in somewhere.
  • If it looks like your pull request has been forgotten, don’t hesitate to send a polite reminder to Matt or the mailing list.

With that out of the way, let’s see how to get set up.

Setting Up

The MacRuby website is developed with webby, a RubyGem that builds websites from static files, so the first step is to install webby and its supporting gems coderay (for source code syntax highlighting), and RedCloth (for textile formatting). To do that, run the following commands (with sudo if need be):

$ gem install webby
$ gem install coderay
$ gem install RedCloth

When that’s done, you should be able to run

$ webby -h

and see the help. Next up, you’ll need a copy of the website source. To get it you can use either git or subversion. Both will work just fine in the end, but git is preferred because it makes it easier to track and merge changes to the source.

Follow these steps to grab a copy with git:

1. If you don’t already have a github account, make one.
2. Fork Matt Aimonetti’s website repo on github
3. Clone your fork onto your local machine:

git clone git@github.com:username/macruby_website.git

With subversion, all you need to do is checkout the repo from Mac OS Forge:

$ svn co http://svn.macosforge.org/repository/ruby/MacRubyWebsite/trunk macruby_website

If everything is in place, you should now be able to build a copy of the website on your local machine:

$ cd /path/to/macruby_website
$ webby autobuild

The webby autobuild command fires up a local webserver and builds the website. It polls for changes to the content directory and regenerates the files that have been modified, so it’s a great way to get quick visual feedback on content you’re developing. Just save, refresh the browser, and there are your changes! When it runs, it should also automatically open a new browser window pointing to your local copy of the website. If for some reason that doesn’t work, you can always visit it yourself at http://localhost:4331.

If autobuild works, you’re ready to create some content.

Creating Content

Several different kinds of content make up the MacRuby website, e.g. blog posts, tutorials and recipes. Whatever type you’re creating though, when you’re done you’ll need to merge your content back into the official source tree. To make this easy we recommend following a specific workflow, the goal of which is to keep your content changes within a single commit or patch, which in turn makes for simple merges.

The steps are as follows:

1. Create a new, descriptively named, topic branch that will contain your content.
2. Use webby to generate the correct kind of template for your content, of which more below.
3. Make the necessary changes to the template, committing as you go. (This is where autobuild really shines.)
4. When you’re satisfied, use git rebase interactive to squash all the little commits into one big one. If you’re not sure how to use git rebase, you can start reading about it here. The man page is also helpful. Just remember: please do not rebase a branch that you have made public and others have already pulled. You won’t make many friends that way.
5. When you’ve squashed all the commits into one, push your branch and email the list, (or send Matt a pull request on github), to let everyone know your changes are ready.

When that’s done, Matt will cherry pick your commit and push it to the svn repo, at which time Laurent will verify the changes and redeploy the site. If you’re not using git, you can still use svn and follow approximately the same steps, though you’ll need to format a patch with svn diff when you’re done.

So now that you know how to submit your changes, you’re ready to make some content.

Creating a New Blog Post

Blog posts are intended to cover major releases and announcements. If you have other ideas for something you think would make a great post, let us know. Once you know what you’re going to write, follow the steps above to create a new branch, and run the following from the root of the website.

$ webby blog:post my_cool_blog_post

You will see output such as:

[09:00:21]  INFO: creating content/blog/2009/08/index.txt
[09:00:21]  INFO: creating content/blog/2009/08/20/my-cool-blog-post.txt

So there you see it created a structure with today’s date and the post’s template. Open my-cool-blog-post.txt in your text editor of choice and start by editing the YAML fields at the top. Make sure to pick a more expressive title and fill in your name as the author. In most cases you won’t need to change the rest. The next step is to create the excerpt (or slug, if you like) for the blog post. This is what will be displayed on the main page of the website. Include the following, adjusted for your post of course, underneath the YAML headers:

<% @page[:excerpt] = capture_erb do %>
  MacRuby displaces Objective-C in the hearts and minds of 
  OS X application developers. Keyboards everywhere rejoice.
<% end %>
<%= RedCloth.new(@page.excerpt).to_html %>

Now you can move on to the rest of the post. When everything looks good, push to your repo and submit a pull request.

Creating a New Recipe

Change your directory to the root of the website, then generate the recipe from the template:

$ webby create:recipe recipes/my_cool_recipe

If you’d like, you can preface the recipe with your name like rich_kilmer_my_cool_recipe. Whatever the case, please note that it’s important when generating a recipe to include the recipes directory in the argument to the create:recipe command. Otherwise you’ll put the recipe in the root of the site rather than where it belongs.

Now open the generated file (it should be in content/recipes/my_cool_recipe) and update the header information:

 title:      rich_kilmer_my_cool_recipe
 created_at: 2009-04-17 15:07:10.638684 -04:00
 recipe:     true
 author:     Your Name Here

You will want to change that title to be more expressive. And then replace ‘Your Name Here’ with your name. Now you’re ready to edit the recipe. When you’re done, follow the steps in “Creating Content” to fix up and submit your patch.

Formatting Tips

The templates are Textile formatted by default. Format code snippets with erb and coderay, like so:

 <% coderay :lang => 'ruby' do -%>
   puts "Hello, MacRuby world!"
 <% end %>

and shell commands like this:

 <pre class="commands">
 $ /usr/local/bin/macirb --simple-prompt
 </pre>