UK Ruby on Rails Consulting

I've put together a wee static web site for https://www.rubyonrails.co.uk/ as I've owned the domain name for ~7 years now and haven't gotten around to doing anything with it. I thought I might as well use it to try and pimp my professional services. ;-) It's a Middleman static site, deployed to Amazon S3 and served from CloudFront.

It's using Middleman's external asset pipeline, which is delegating the role of building assets to gulp which, in turn, is assembling CSS & JavaScript from various upstream bower components. I seem to have hit the sweet spot (for me) between it being easy to manage content, while being nice and efficiently deployed to production.

Speaking of deploying to production, I've got Travis CI on the case: wossname/www.rubyonrails.co.uk which will build the site and, if it's successful (and on the master branch), automatically deploy to production. That means I can make changes to the site from my iPad, using something like Working Copy, and have the changes show up on the site a few minutes later.

I should write this into a blog post, but meanwhile, you should check out the site and hire my l33t skills. ;-)

Notes on Doing Stuff

Best place to start is to install all the dependencies (of which there are many, in three different packaging systems!). If you've already got rake kicking around, you can install them all with:

rake deps

If you haven't, it's probably easiest to gem install rake first. ;-) It assumes you've already got a working Ruby installation, and a working NodeJS installation with npm.

To run the Middleman server locally, I've wrapped it with foreman because that's how I roll. You can start the server up with:

foreman start

and it'll be available on http://localhost:5000/. If you want to just build the static site itself, you can run:

rake build

and it will stick the output in the build/ folder, ready to be deployed.

To deploy the site, build it first, then run:

rake deploy

and it'll sync the contents of the build/ folder up to S3. It assumes that you have S3 credentials set in your environment -- the easiest way to do that is to set environment variables for AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY. The deploy task doesn't depend on the build task, just because I want them to run as separate parts of the CI build. Unfortunately, middleman rebuilds the external assets every time you launch it (see #1916) and rebuilding them three times on every CI build seemed a bit wasteful.