Progress on the Build Script

by Dorian Patterson on 2013-02-17 22:44 -05:00

Since the first post, I’ve been looking at various technologies to make maintaining the site easier. I wanted to start with writing a build script that would automate the generation of the static files, run any tests (of which I currently have none) and deploy the site, all in one step if possible.

At the moment I’ve have a very simple Rakefile. In researching how I was to go about writing the tasks, I read up on the Kernel module, which has the system method. Very handy, though whether or not it is a good practice is something that remains to be seen.

I also wanted to try writing tests for my rake file, but I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around writing tests in general. I’ll get to that, on the next release.

Also in my research I came to the subject of virtual machines (VMs) and provisioning as way of creating and isolating a development environment.

Vagrant

Vagrant is an interface to VirtualBox that allows provisioning of VMs with various tools like Chef or Puppet. The idea is nice, but the set up and execution unfortunately have failed in some aspects. VirtualBox’s shared folders suffer from severe performance degradations, but that was easy enough to solve by using a Network File System) service. Unfortunately, I had issues with Middleman: editing a file locally while the Middleman server is running wouldn’t register changes with Middleman itself. I worked around this by mounting the shared folder with sshfs, but that seemed to lead to more issues, and while trying to suspend the VM, the terminal completely locked up. I had to restart my physical machine.

So for the moment, I’ll be passing on using a VM to develop.

Middleman Blog extension

There’s a bug when using the middleman-blog extension. If you don’t explicitly specify your timezone in the configuration file config.rb via Time.zone, the extension will complain about the date in the filename and the date in the frontmatter not matching.

I think a fix is on the way, but either way, it might be prudent to just require setting the time zone.