Hosted websites, Continuous Integration GitHub and GitLab

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 12:08:29 -0400

Back when I started hosting this blog on GitHub you had two choices. Either you used Jekyll and GitHub would do it's behind the scene magic to convert your markdown files into your site or you did it all on your own machine and you pushed up the finished site to be served under GitHub pages.

I started with the former but moved to the later using Hugo as my site generator soon after. This has worked for years but it's gotten a little messy. I've needed two GitHub repos - one for the source for my blog and the other for the rendered web site and also I've had to use Git submodules - something I never fully understood. This has caused me troubles at times when trying to write posts from multiple machines.

I thought I'd look this weekend to see if things have gotten better.

It turns out, it has. Now, you can just serve your repo as a web page just like before but you can also set up your site using GitHub actions.

GitHub actions is their facility to run some job when something occurs. A typical setup would be to run your tests whenever code is pushed or a pull request is merged. I taught this to my undergrads last semester. Basically, you just set up a configuration file that tells GitHub what to do.

Here's the config file I used with my class for the automated testing:

 name: C/C++ CI

on:
 push:
 branches: [ "main" ]
 pull_request:
 branches: [ "main" ]

jobs:
 build:

 runs-on: ubuntu-latest

 steps:
 - uses: actions/checkout@v3
 - name: make
 run: make
 - name: make tests
 run: make tests
 - name: ./tests
 run: ./tests

GitHub spins up an Ubuntu image then builds the project and runs the tests. I get an email with the results or I can see them on GitHub.

Now I can use the same facility for serving this blog. The script runs hugo instead of make and make tests but it's the same idea. Whenever I push a new post, GitHub rebuilds the site and serves it all from one repo.

Much simpler and much cleaner. What's more, when I turned on GitHub pages and selected the "use GitHub actions" option, it suggested I use their "Hugo config script" which worked right out of the box.

While I was doing this I thought I'd also check out GitLab. GitLab is a GitHub competitor. I like them both but since I've had so many friends at GitHub and GitHub education specifically I've always gone that way. Now, my friends have all left GitHub and I can't say I've been happy with all the companies latest moves so I thought I'd check out the other guys.

It turns out GitLab also hosts pages and has a very similar actions based deployment mechanism. I haven't switched over yet and might not but I think I will start using it for my regular repo hosting. It looks like a very nice alternative.

So, if you're looking for hosting, check out GitHub and GitLab with actions. I'd also say that if you're teaching a class at the right level, actions can be great to teach continuous integration and testing. I'll probably write that up when I cover it in class in a few weeks

That's it for now. I'll try to post this. If it works, the changeover from GitHub old style to GitHub actions went smoothly.

High Ed Web 2019

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 08:34:04 -0400

I spent the last few days in Milwuakee at High Ed web 2019, a conference for higher education web professionals. Most attendees were college web developers or designers along people who run web operations at colleges and universities and related vendors. Being a CS teacher, I was a bit of an outsider but still got a lot out of the conference.

It was our first time in Milwuakee so we had to see some sights.

The Bronz Fonz on the riverwalk:

Then there was Gertie the duck:

And then more ducks by the river:

Later, we had a transcendental meal at The Odd Duck.

Apparently, Milwaukee loves their ducks.

We also hit the lakefront, Public, Art, Chudnow, and Grohmann museums, public market and few other things.

<figure class="z_image_center"><img src="/img/highwebed/artmuseum.jpg" alt="Art Museum on the lake" width="200px"/><figcaption> <p>Art Museum on the lake</p> </figcaption> </figure>

All were cool but I'd say that the Grohmann was the standout - if you're in Milwaukee, make the time for it.

As to the conference itself I attended a few interesting sessions. One talk was on Agile by John Wililams (no, not THAT John Williams). John spoke about Agile as a mindset rather than a specific tech/development thing and talked about how the classic comedy Airplane! was develped as an Agile project. It made me think of how Computational Thinking really isn't anything new or how OOP design patterns were developed by an architect.

Another talk by Sven Haas gave me a fresh perspective from the IT manager's point of view. We rail all the time in the CS education forums about how hard it is to get our schools IT teams to install the development environments and tools we want to use with our Students. Sven reminded me that for every single request we make of our infrastructure people, there are tons of ramification. Long term software maintenance and versioning, security, legal ramifications, and more. Sven also reminded me that all to often parties, including teachers and students, talk across each other rather than to each other - "I need this installed" rather than having a conversation about needs and jointly developing solutions.

There were also a couple of more technical talks I enjoyed.

The conference organizers also did a great job. Kudos to the Milwuakee convention center for having their restrooms in order:

And for the conference team on adding the signs for further clarification.

A big highlight for me was reconnecting with Maccabee. Mac was in my class at Stuy way back around '95. We've been in touch but as his career has took him out of NYC it's been years since we've seen each other in person. Always great to see an old friend.

I probably won't be back to High Ed Web. While it's a great conference, I'm not really the intended audience. When you can only go to so many things a year due to time and money you have to call your shots. I will say though, if you're in the higher ed web space, you should really check it out.

web on C'est la Z

Hosted websites, Continuous Integration GitHub and GitLab

High Ed Web 2019