jwebsite/workflow/index.md

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reviewed: 18/4/20
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# Working with Franklin

\blurb{Set things up in minutes and focus on writing great content.}

\lineskip

\toc

## Creating your website

To get started, the easiest is to use the `newsite` function to generate a website folder which you can then modify to your heart's content.
The command takes one mandatory argument: the _name_ of the folder (which can be `"."` if you want to set things up in your current directory).
You can optionally specify a template:

```julia-repl
julia> newsite("TestWebsite"; template="vela")
✓ Website folder generated at "TestWebsite" (now the current directory).
→ Use serve() from Franklin to see the website in your browser.
```

There are a number of [simple templates](https://tlienart.github.io/FranklinTemplates.jl/) you can choose from and tweak.

\note{The templates are meant to be used as _starting points_ and will likely require some fixes to match what you want. Your help to make them better is very welcome.}

Once you have created a new website folder, you can start the live-rendering of your website with

```julia-repl
julia> serve()
→ Initial full pass...
→ Starting the server...
✓ LiveServer listening on http://localhost:8000/ ...
  (use CTRL+C to shut down)
```

and navigate in a browser to the corresponding address to preview the website.

### Folder structure

The initial call to `newsite` generates a folder with the following structure:

```plaintext
.
├── _assets/
├── _layout/
├── _libs/
├── config.md
└── index.md
```

After running `serve` the first time, an additional folder is generated: `__site` which will contain your full generated website.
Among these folders:

@@tlist
* the files in the top folder such as `index.md` are the source files for the generated pages, you must have an `index.md` or `index.html` at the top level but can then use whatever folder structure you want (see further),
* you should **not** modify the content of `__site` as it's *generated* and any changes you do in there may be silently over-written whenever you modify files elsewhere,
* the folders `_assets/`, `_libs/`, `_layout` and  `_css` contain *auxiliary files* supporting your site:
  * `_assets/` will contain images, code snippets, etc.,
  * `_css/` will contain the style sheets,
  * `_libs/` will contain javascript libraries,
  * `_layout/` will contain bits of HTML scaffolding for the generated pages,
@@

### Top folder

In this folder,

@@tlist
* `index.md` will generate the site's landing page,
* `pages/page1.md` would correspond to pages on your website (you can have whatever subfolder structure you want in here),
* `config.md` allows to specify variables that help steer the page generation, you can also use it to declare global variables or definitions that can then be used on all pages.
@@

\note{You can also write pages in plain HTML. For instance you may want to write an `index.html` file instead of generating it via the `index.md`. You will still need to put it at the exact same place and let Franklin copy the files appropriately.}

Note that Franklin generates a folder structure in `__site` which allows to have URLs like `[website]/page1/`. The following rules are applied:

* the filename is `[path/]index.md` or `[path/]index.html`, it will be copied over "as is" to `__site/[path/]index.html`,
* the filename is `[path/]somepage.md` or `[path/]somepage.html`, it will be copied to `__site/[path/]somepage/index.html`.

So for instance if we ignore auxiliary files and you have

```
.
├── index.md
├── folder
│   └── subpage.md
└── page.md
```

it will lead to

```
__site
  ├── index.html
  ├── folder
  │   └── subpage
  │       └── index.html
  └── page
      └── index.html
```

which allows to have the following URLs:

@@tlist
* `[website]/`
* `[website]/page/`
* `[website]/folder/subpage/`
@@

### Reserved names

To avoid name clashes, refrain from using the following paths where `/` indicates the topdir (website folder):

@@tlist
* `/css/` or `/css.md`
* `/layout/` or `/layout.md`
* `/literate/` or `/literate.md`
@@

Also bear in mind that Franklin will ignore `README.md`, `LICENSE.md`, `Manifest.toml` and `Project.toml`.

### Editing and testing your website

The `serve` function can be used to launch a server which will track and render modifications.
There are a few useful options you can use beyond the barebone `serve()`, do `?serve` in your REPL for all options, we list a few noteworthy one below:

@@tlist
* `clear=false`, whether to erases `__site` and starts from a blank slate,
* `single=false`, whether to do a single build pass generating all pages and not start the server.
* `prerender=false`, whether to prerender code blocks and maths (see the [optimisation step](#optimisation_step))
* `verb=false`, whether to show information about which page is being processed etc,
* `silent=false`, whether to suppress any informative messages that could otherwise appear in  your console when editing your site, this goes one step further than `verb=false` as it also  applies for code evaluation,
* `eval_all=false`, whether to re-evaluate all code blocks on all pages.
@@

## Post-processing

### Verify links

Before deploying you may want to verify that links on your website lead somewhere, to do so use the `verify_links()`.
It will take a few second to verify all links on every generated pages but can be quite helpful to identify dead links or links with typos:

```julia-repl
julia> verify_links()
Verifying links... [you seem online ✓]
- internal link issue on page index.md: /menu3/.
```

then after fixing and re-generating pages:

```julia-repl
julia> verify_links()
All internal and external links verified ✓.
```

### Pre-rendering and compression

The `optimize` function can

@@tlist
* pre-render KaTeX and highlight.js code to HTML so that the pages don't have to load these javascript libraries,
* minify all generated HTML and CSS.
@@
See `?optimize` for options.

Those two steps may lead to faster loading pages.
Note that in order to run them, you will need a couple of external dependencies as mentioned in the [installation section](/index.html#installing_optional_extras).

The `optimize` function is called by default in the `publish` function which can be used to help deploy your website.

### Publish

\note{If you use GitHub or GitLab with a deployment action on those platforms, you do not need to use `publish`, you can just push your changes and let the relevant action do the rest on the platform. See the section on [deployment](/workflow/deploy/).}

Once you have synched your local folder with a remote repository (see [deployment instructions](/workflow/deploy/)), the `publish` function can be called to deploy your website; it essentially:

@@tlist
- applies an optional optimisation step (see previous point),
- does a `git add -A; git commit -am "franklin-update"; git push`.
@@

See `?publish` for more information.

In any case, before deploying, if you're working on a _project website_ i.e. a website whose root URL will look like `username.gitlab.io/project/` then you should add the following line in your `config.md` file:

```markdown
@def prepath = "project"
```

the `publish` function will then ensure that all links are fixed before deploying your website.

Note also that the `publish` function accepts a `final=` keyword to which you can pass any function `() -> nothing` to do some final post-processing before pushing updates online.
For instance, you can use `final=lunr` where `lunr` is a function exported by Franklin which generates a Lunr search index (see [this tutorial](/extras/lunr/) for more details).