Apache Arrow Website

Overview

Jekyll is used to generate HTML files from the Markdown + templates in this repository. The built version of the site is kept on the asf-site branch, which gets deployed to https://arrow.apache.org.

Adding Content

To add a blog post, create a new markdown file in the _posts directory, following the model of existing posts. In the front matter, you should specify an "author". This should be your Apache ID if you have one, or it can just be your name. To add additional metadata about yourself (GitHub ID, website), add yourself to _data/contributors.yml. This object is keyed by apacheId, so use that as the author in your post. (It doesn't matter if the ID actually exists in the ASF; all metadata is local to this project.)

Prerequisites

With a recent version of Ruby (i.e. one that does not have an End-Of-Life (EOL) status) installed, run the following commands to install Jekyll.

gem install bundler
bundle install

We also need Node.JS to use webpack for maintaining dependent JavaScript and CSS libraries.

We can install webpack and dependent JavaScript and CSS libraries automatically by following command lines to preview or build the site. So we just need to install Node.JS here.

Previewing the site

Run the following and open http://localhost:4000/ to preview generated site locally:

bundle exec rake

Deployment

apache/arrow-site

On a commit to the main branch of apache/arrow-site, the rendered static site will be published to the asf-site branch using GitHub Actions.

Forks

When implementing changes to the website on a fork, the GitHub Actions workflow behaves differently.

On a commit to the main branch, the rendered static site will be published to a branch named gh-pages (rather than asf-site). If it doesn't already exist, a gh-pages branch will be automatically created by the GitHub Actions workflow when it succeeds.

The gh-pages branch is intended to be used with GitHub Pages. Deploying changes on the gh-pages branch to GitHub Pages is a useful way to preview changes to the website. It can also be a helpful way to share changes that are still in progress with others, since they can easily view them by navigating to the GitHub Pages URL in their web browser.

For the changes on the gh-pages branch to be deployed to GitHub Pages, the Source branch for GitHub Pages deployment must be set to gh-pages in the repository Settings of your fork (by default, the Source branch should be set to asf-site). Instructions on how to configure the Source branch can be found in the GitHub Pages documentation.

FYI: We can also generate the site for https://arrow.apache.org/ to _site/ locally by the following command line:

JEKYLL_ENV=production bundle exec rake generate

Using Docker

If you don't wish to change or install ruby and nodejs locally, you can use docker to build and preview the site with a command like:

docker run -v `pwd`:/arrow-site -p 4000:4000 -it ruby bash
cd arrow-site
apt-get update
apt-get install -y npm
gem install bundler
bundle install
# Serve using local container address
bundle exec rake HOST=0.0.0.0

Then open http://localhost:4000 locally