Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
124 lines (81 loc) · 4.43 KB

HACKING.md

File metadata and controls

124 lines (81 loc) · 4.43 KB

Working on the www.ubuntu.com project

The www.ubuntu.com codebase is a Django app, which also includes some NPM-based tools and tasks for building static files like CSS.

Running the site

With Docker

The recommended way to run the site is with the existing ./run script, which uses Docker behind the scenes.

First install Docker (on Linux you may need to and add your user to the docker group).

Then to learn about this script's options, type:

./run --help

The basic options are:

./run serve  # Start the Django server, optionally watching for changes
./run build  # Build the CSS
./run watch  # Watch and build the CSS whenever Sass changes
./run clean  # Remove created files and docker containers

Watching in the background

The start function optionally takes a --watch argument:

./run serve --watch

This will effectively run the ./run watch command in the background while also running the server.

NB: You won't see the output from the watcher by default. This makes it difficult to know if it's working properly.

To check if the watcher daemon is running, use docker ps. Then you can use docker attach to follow the output from the background watcher.

Running the site with native python

Since the site is basically a Django app, you can also run the site in the traditional way using python 2.7 and virtualenv:

virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
./entrypoint 0.0.0.0:8001

Now browse to the site at http://127.0.0.1:8001. If it looks a bit odd, it's probably because you haven't built sass - see below.

Building Sass

The CSS needs to be built from the static/css/styles.scss file. This in turn requires ubuntu-vanilla-theme and its dependency, vanilla-framework.

If you can't build using the ./run build command, you can pull down dependencies this using npm or yarn:

npm install
# or
yarn install

Then you can use the built in scripts to build or watch the Sass:

npm run build  # Build the Sass to CSS then exit
npm run watch  # Dynamically watch for Sass changes and build CSS
# or
yarn run build  # Build the Sass to CSS then exit
yarn run watch  # Dynamically watch for Sass changes and build CSS

Overriding NPM modules

You can use the ./run script to use NPM modules from a local folder on a one-time basis, instead of the modules declared in package.json, as follows:

./run --node-module $HOME/projects/vanilla-framework watch  # Build CSS dynamically, using a local version of vanilla-framework

Making changes to the site

Guides for making changes to the www.ubuntu.com codebase.

Navigation

The basic navigation structure of the site is listed in navigation.yaml. This file lists all the top-level section pages and their children and grandchildren. The top menu, footer menu and breadcrumb navigation are all built from this list.

The file should be of the following format:

{section-identifier}:
  title: {Section title}
  url_path: /{section-url}

  children:
    - title: {Child title}
      url_path: /{child-url}

      children:
        - title: {Grandchild}
          url_path: /{grandchild-url}

    - title: {Hidden child}
      url_path: {child-url}
      hidden: True

If a child is "hidden", then it won't be displayed in the navigation menus, either in the top nav, the footer nav, or in the breadcrumb nav on other pages.

How it works

The navigation.yaml file is read in webapp/settings.py to create a Django settings objects django.conf.settings.NAV_SECTIONS.

This is then used in webapp.context_processors.navigation in webapp/context_processors.py to add two items to the template context:

  • breadcrumbs: Information about the current page, its siblings and its parents
  • nav_sections: A direct representation of the NAV_SECTIONS setting

These are then used in the templates/templates/base.html and templates/templates/footer.html templates to build the markup for the top navigation, the breadcrumb navigation and the footer navigation.