Now I’ve got this working to some extent here are some notes about setting up Jekyll with SVN and Apache:
Server – Debian 9 Stretch, normal command-line only install. Set up system to use email server (campus smarthost in our case).
Install SVN and Apache and set up accordingly.
Install Jekyll:
apt install jekyll
Create an SVN repository for the site files.
Create new project directories at a temporary location, e.g.
jekyll new /tmp/newsite
Commit these files to the SVN repository (I normally check out the repository on my local workstation, copy the directory in /tmp from the server into the working directory on the workstation, add them and commit). Delete the directory in /tmp.
On the server, create the actual website file location by exporting from the SVN via a temporary location:
svn export file:///path/to/repository /tmp/buildfiles
jekyll build --source /tmp/buildfiles /var/www/sitename
rm -Rf /tmp/buildfiles
Configure Apache to serve from /var/www/sitename. In our case we ultimately wanted to serve multiple sites through a reverse proxy, so we used a vhost serving on an alternate port. This can be a handy testing configuration – you don’t have to worry about fiddling with the other website settings. For example, using port 8081:
<VirtualHost *:8081>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /var/www/sitename
</VirtualHost>
(Remember to change ports.conf to listen on the new port!)
Test by pointing a webserver at server:8081
Once that’s all working, set up the post-commit hook script to automatically build the site on a commit. Our current setup is:
#!/bin/sh
# POST-COMMIT HOOK
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
REPOS_BASENAME=$(/usr/bin/basename "$REPOS")
TMP_SVN_EXPORT="/tmp/$REPOS_BASENAME"
# These two need configured!
PUBLIC_WWW="/var/www/sitename"
BUILD_EMAIL="your.email@this.address"
"$REPOS"/hooks/mailer.py commit "$REPOS" $REV "$REPOS"/hooks/mailer.conf
LOGVAR=$(/export0/svn_config/jekyll_build.sh "$REPOS" $REV "$TMP_SVN_EXPORT" "$PUBLIC_WWW" 2>&1)
echo "$LOGVAR" | /usr/bin/unix2dos | mail -s "$REPOS_BASENAME build $REV" "$BUILD_EMAIL"
(Note that on Debian you need to install the dos2unix package. Needed as plain text email expects CRLF line terminators as specified in RFC 2822.)
#!/bin/sh
REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
TMP_SVN_EXPORT="$3"
PUBLIC_WWW="$4"
/usr/bin/svn export --quiet file:///"$REPOS" "$TMP_SVN_EXPORT"
/usr/bin/jekyll build --source "$TMP_SVN_EXPORT" --destination "$PUBLIC_WWW"
rm -Rf "$TMP_SVN_EXPORT"
Note that the build process runs under the Apache user account, so set permissions appropriately. Also, when troubleshooting remember that on Debian 9 the Apache process is configured by default to use a private /tmp directory!
This works for our current needs, although it isn’t optimised. Improvements would be:
- Unify the setup for the commit email and build email scripts.
- Build the site in the background (although you’d have to tweak how the logging output works in that case).
Of course, the professionals would use something like a combination of GitLab and Jenkins to automate this stuff properly…