This page is about updating and maintaining an existing ANU Jekyl Site. This is typically something you might do once a year or just before a class starts for a course website.

You might have come back to a website and found that it is “not working” any more when it seemed to be fine last year: this page will help with that too.

Spring clean actions#

The main spring cleaning actions for a website is to update the theme Gems and and build script. This isn’t about updating content (that’s up to you and may not be necessary). This boils down to copying the latest config files from the Jekyll template repository. Here’s the steps:

  1. Gemfile: copy the contents of the Gemfile from the template into the Gemfile in your own site.

  2. Gemfile.lock: copy the contents of Gemfile.lock from the template into the Gemfile.lock file in your own site.

  3. .gitlab-ci.yml: copy the contents of the Gitlab CI file into the .gitlab-ci.yml file in your own site.

Once you have done this, you can test your site locally by running bundle install which will install the latest theme/plugin/other gems accordingg to Gemfile.lock. Then run bundle exec jekyll serve to test your site.

If your site doesn’t work having updated these three files, it’s probably time ask for help on the support Team. You could try running bundle update and then bundle exec jekyll serve again which will try to resolve the gem versions again.

Frequently Asked Questions#

Why update?#

The ANU Jekyll Theme is updated a few times a year with:

  • bugfixes: you may not notice them but they are found every now and then. Some fixes related to accessibility could make a website much more useful to those using assistive technologies like screen readers.

  • important and required updates to the ANU brand identity: we are not allowed to publish websites that do not follow the ANU identity precisely, and non-compliant websites could be removed at any time.

There’s not usually a need to update a website every week, but following the steps above around once a year ensures that your site is mostly up to date.

Why is my website broken?#

Sometimes Jekyll sites that worked last year will not build this year. They might fail locally (after running bundle exec jekyll serve) or they might not build when pushed to Gitlab.

Theoretically if you don’t change Gemfile.lock, you should be able to run bundle install and build a Jekyll site forever, but in practice this sometimes doesn’t work.

Typical reasons might be:

  • you changed Ruby version on your computer and the new version doesn’t work with the Gems that are currently installed

  • you are setting up your site on a new computer and the Gems you had installed aren’t available any more so bundle install won’t work.

  • somebody else ran bundle update (thus changing Gemfile.lock) or changed the Gemfile and pushed your website to Gitlab in a non-working state and nobody has noticed until now.

As we all know, even with the best of intentions software that compiled last year might not this year, especially when it involves external libraries or if you changed to a new computer. If your site unexpectedly doesn’t work, please be gentle when asking for help :-)

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