This is an unpublished draft preview that might include content that is not yet approved. The published website is at w3.org/WAI/.

Architecture, build and deploy

Concepts for Content Authors

The website theme and development processes help ensure that the site and every page has a consistent layout and design. The architecture and associated development workflow allows us to develop individual resources in their own GitHub repositories using a GitHub Pull Requests with previews provided on Netlify.

The primary technology behind the website is Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generating tool. The “WAI Website Theme” provides page templates, common “components”, CSS, plus front-end JavaScript to provide common styling and behaviour. Source files you create for the web pages can include Markdown, HTML, CSS, and Javascript along with the Liquid template language that comes with Jekyll. YAML front matter at the top of pages provides options such as translations. A build process takes the source files and generates the web page files that get deployed.

As a content author you will usually be working on content for one specific part of the WAI website. This usually involves editing HTML or Markdown files in one of the many git repositories that hold the source files. In fact, the WAI site is broken up into many modules, called resources, each with it’s own repository in the W3C GitHub organization. You can easily work in isolation on content files in a repository using either GitHub online features or a local development environment. Netlify Previews alow you to review what you changes will look like when deployed to the WAI website.

You follow a typical GitHub Flow style workflow, working on your own “feature” branch with an associated Pull Request to support collaboration. Netlify automatically generates previews which can be used to see how your resource changes look. Links to the preview are automatically inserted into the Pull Requests for easy access.

Sometimes, you will need to work on files that are shared between all resources, such as the file which defines the site navigation. Plus, if you are creating a new resource it needs to be added to the wai-website resource which pulls all the components together to make the complete wai website.

Working on these shared files requires extra care and coordination with the WAI Website Editor as incorrect integration of these multiple parts can break the site.

Usually, when changes become available for publication the the WAI website editor will provide a quick review before carrying out integration or update of the live site. A Netlify preview of the entire site is used to check for problems before the new site is published.

Site build process

The WAI Website is created using a “build” process that converts the source file content in the resources into the wai website content. It combines all the resources and mixes in the shared files including shared navigation and a theme.

Separate builds are run for the individual resources (repos) previews and the full website to test integration of all resources, and also when the site is published.

While the mechanics of the build are complex, involving Jekyll, git submodules and filesystem symlinks, an overview can be useful to keep in mind:

Deep Dive for DevOps

Please see the summary info above.

Services

A number of services are used to support managing of the the site source, building previews of changes and releasing updates to the live site.

Architecture and Previews

The WAI websit is a static generated website:

Content Modules or Resources

Special Modules

Common Configuration Files

Configurations files include:

Git Submodule Use

In a nutshell, git submodules are a way to include a git repo into another (supermodule). The supermodule references a specific commit of each submodule until it is manually updated (using git submodule update. Use of submodules thus offers the possibility of referencing any versions of submodules, requiring a commit to persist the submodule state held in the supermodule.

The WAI site uses submodules for subparts of the site and also shared theme files. These are included when building both the section preview and the main site. The HEAD commit (head of default branch) of is always used and this requires all supermodules to be updated to reference the latest submodule as part of the build (local, Netlify or deploy).

Technical Issues with the Modular Structure

This separation into modules and resources allows independent work on the various sections of the website. However, it also causes a lot of duplication of configuration in each repo and Netlify sites meaning changes to all modules become very time consuming. With the current configuration, changes to shared files may propagate to other resources or the main site earlier than required, for example adding items to the shared navigation will appear in the next site publication.

NOTE: It may be better to use a monlithic site and build, losing all the links and submodules. However the build will need to be fast, eg incremental for module develoment previews.

Technical Details

Design Components, Design Style

Direct link to the Design Components, Design Style. (in English)

The design style guide shows the application of the design for individual components of the website. If there are changes to a component (HTML/CSS), we can update it in the design style guide and the team. It updates consistently through the WAI website. Currently the design style guide only has the HTML rendering of the different components, however, there are often easier ways to get the HTML with includes that are provided by the theme. The advantage is that they automatically update when HTML/CSS changes are necessary.

Jekyll

Jekyll Website

Jekyll is a static site generator. A site build step takes content source files (in Markdown or HTML) and adds consistent templates to it and generates navigation and then outputs the whole site as static HTML etc pages.

Gem Dependencies

As a Ruby application, Jekyll has mechanism to manage dependencies on code modules AKA Gems. In each resource A Gemfile specifies the required top-level modules. A Gemfile.lock records the actual versions of each module used and those they in turn pull in as determined during the last bundle install step. If the lock file is checked into version control it allows deterministic builds with a known versions of everything. At least in theory.

A complication with our modular architecture is that all the preview builds and the main website builds need to use use the same versions of all modules to avoid problems. In order lot of duplicate file update housekeeping when Gems change a custom shared Gem is used that specifies the required Gems. If all the Gemfile.locks are generated at the same time everything will use the same version of all modules.

Problem with dependencies

However a ‘bundle install’ or ‘bundle update’ will recalculate all the versions recorded in the gemfile.lock. As the exact version of Gems are not specified, changes can easily creep in, possible breaking builds. For example if the shared Gem is rebuilt.

This happened recently when a new minor version of Jekyll pulled in a new “rouge” gem version that broke the builds, requiring all the gemfile.lock to be updated, in turn causing problems with open PRs. Each active branch in a PR needed the new Gemfile.lock to stop broken builds.

A solution is to specify the version of the top level dependencies in the shared Gemfile. Then any bundle commands will use the same versions of all dependencies. However, eventhat that is not foolproof as it relies of Gem publishers to not change their dependencies for a given version. It will require manual management of version updates, but that is a good thing given the shoddy way some module developers handle version numbers.

Some files need to be shared between all the submodules for preview and the main site for deployment. Others are submodule specific but the main website also needs to access them.

Jekyll is quite limited when it comes to configuration. The current use of git submodules requires use of symblinks in the main wai-website to ensure the Jekyll build sees the resource files in the correct location. In addition some files must appear in the same location in both individual resource builds for preview and the full website build. This imposes restrictions on what Jekyll config options are used in the resources. The result is a complex file structure for resources, especially wai-website.

In particular, be careful to:

WAI Website Theme

WAI Website Theme

The theme ensures that we consistently use the same professional HTML and CSS. It takes the data from the style guide and translates it to something that Jekyll can use to produce the site. The theme is downloaded from the internet whenever a page is (re)generated.

The theme also provides documentation.

NB Changes to CSS source files require a step to build the CSS file provided in the theme. Install and run gulp with npm install && npx gulp css in the project root.

WAI Website Plugin

WAI Website Plugin

In addition to the theme, we use a plugin, mainly for handling translation links.

YAML Front Matter

WAI Website Front Matter
Jekyll Front Matter
YAML

We use front matter to provide metadata that is used for generating the <title>, the footer, SEO and social media info, and a lot for translations.

Our source files with the YAML front matter block are processed by Jekyll as a special file.

GitHub

Whenever a file is changed on GitHub a (for our purposes) draft preview is generated. Pull Request generate separate previews through Netlify. It means you don’t have to install anything on your machine to make changes and preview them (although that is possible).

It is a best practice to keep different concerns separated, so we have a lot of different repositories for different resources. It helps us to track feedback through GitHub issues and (for EO) allows participants to just follow the discussion on the repositories relevant to them.

Git Submodules

Due to these many repositories, the main WAI website needs to collect them all in one repository. To reference those repositories a technology called git submodules is used. It brings in all the files from the submodules’ repositories and makes them accessible as files in the main repository. Then, symbolic links are used to make Jekyll see them. The build steps pull in all the required modules before running the Jekyll build process.

While it seems like an overly complicated way to share the data, it allows us to bring changes in with one command line command, even if several repositories have changed.

In order to see which repository and branch provide a particular submodule inspect the .gitmodules file. Adding a new submodule is more complex than just editing this file though. requiring a git command.

Jeckyll is restrictive in terms of file organisation and yet the WAI website architecture is complex with files in many git submodules that need to be processed. The solution used is linux symbolic links (eg as created with “ln -s”). These alow files and directories to actually be “references” to items under various folders external in the filesystem. eg pulled into a github submodule directory.

The following symblinks are used

The wai-website-data repository

Currently we include the wai-website-data repository in every repository to convey common data throughout all the repositories. In detail, we have the following information available:

This approach brings many problems, mostly for Microsoft Windows users due to the use of “symlinks”. From Jekyll 4.1 on, data files can be added to the theme, which will greatly simplify our workflow.

Netlify Previews

Previews of individual resources are set up in Netlify via Github. The credentials for Netlify are available on the WAI Website page (Team Only). Basically a single Netlify site exists for each resource and is linked to the git hub repo.

The preview should be viewable under <github-repo>.netlify.app. The configuration is set in the netlify.toml configuration file that includes the following information:

[build]

command = "bundle exec jekyll build --config '_config.yml,_config_staging.yml'"
publish = "_site"

[[redirects]]
  from = "/"
  to = "/permalink/of/main/resource/page/"

Change the permalink and commit the file to the repository.

Creating a New Netlify Site

In the Netlify web app, click the “New site from Git” button, click on GitHub. Select W3C from the account picker on the top left and search for the repository. Click on the repository in the result list.

On the next page, the configuration from the netlify.toml file is already available and the configuration needs only to be saves by clicking the “Deploy site” button.

Netlify creates a random name for the site, which is usually not what one wants. Click site settings on the page that has opened and then select “Change site name”. In the popup, change the name to the github repository name (without w3c/).

Pull Request Build Notifications

By default, Netlify does not inform users that a Pull Request preview deploys. In the settings for the site, click on “Build & deploy” and make sure the “Deploy contexts” are set like this:

Under “deploy notifications”, use the “add notification” dropdown to add three “GitHub pull request comment” notifications:

  1. This should usually be master but generally be the “default branch” as set in GitHub. ↩

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This is an unpublished draft preview that might include content that is not yet approved. The published website is at w3.org/WAI/.