git-scm.com is now a static website

git-scm.com is now a static website

[Johannes Schindelin]

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Hi all,

almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
(because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
after midnight).

This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
contributed:

- Jeff King for nerdsniping Matt Burke to look into migrating the site to
  Jekyll,

- Matt Burke for the first spike that identified what would be easy and
  what would be tricky in said migration,

- Victoria Dye for working with me during the first hackathon and figuring
  out all the hard parts such as sorting and filtering the GUIs at
  https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis,

- Bjørn Erik Pedersen for his tireless work on Hugo, a static site
  generator that is fast enough to handle the amount of content on Git's
  home page within a reasonable amount of time (unlike Jekyll, sadly),

- Andrei Rybak, Pedro Rijo, Kaartic Sivaraam and Todd Zullinger for
  testing the site when it was still rough around its edges,

- Oswald Buddenhagen for pointing out that the auto-generated content
  needs to be tracked separately from the non-generated content,

- Todd Zullinger for suggesting to use an automated link checker,

- Matthias Aßhauer for reviewing (part of) that humongous 242-commits
  strong PR at https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/pull/1804,

- Liam Bigelow for writing the only client-side Javascript-backed search
  engine (called Pagefind) capable of dealing with the size of
  git-scm.com, and particularly for his patience and for his competent &
  kind assistance when I tried to adapt Pagefind to the needs of Git's
  home page, so that searching for Git's subcommands will find the
  corresponding manual pages first,

- Matthias Endler and Thomas Zahner for their extensive work on the link
  checker Lychee, including their outstanding help with my PR to support
  the extension-less URLs we want to see on git-scm.com,

- Toon Claes for not only pointing out that the style sheet for the search
  results needs fixing but also for fixing it right away,

- Taylor Blau and Jeff King for endorsing the work enthusiastically and
  suggesting to switch over already at the end of the Git Contributor
  Summit that took place at GitMerge '24.

- Taylor Blau for assisting in the switch, taking care of the DNS
  adjustments, and in particular for taking care of the rollback when the
  first attempt at switching failed (due to caching issues) allowing me to
  catch my train.

You will note that the site looks pretty similar to the version before,
and this is of course intentional.

There are subtle differences, though. For example, the site search is now
language-dependent. Searching for "commit" when on a Spanish version of a
manual page will find only matching Spanish pages:

https://git-scm.com/search/results?search=commit&language=es

As with all big efforts, I am under no illusion about everything working
as intended, I do expect some fall-out to crop up (e.g. external links
that might now be broken, even if I tried very hard to avoid that). I hope
that the team spirit I described above invites more helping hands in
getting those issues found and sorted out.

There are also new things that have sprung up that are not caused by the
migration to Hugo/Pagefind, for example some diagrams no longer shown (see
https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/issues/1862) because the Google Charts
API entered the Google Graveyard. Any takers?

Ciao,
Johannes

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Taylor Blau]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).
>
> This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
> contributed:

I'm really excited to see this change (or really, lack of change,
because the conversion was so seamless and faithful to the original
design).

Thank you for sticking with this for all these years and seeing it
through to the finish line. Congratulations to yourself and those below
for all of the hard work that went into this!

> - Taylor Blau and Jeff King for endorsing the work enthusiastically and
>   suggesting to switch over already at the end of the Git Contributor
>   Summit that took place at GitMerge '24.
>
> - Taylor Blau for assisting in the switch, taking care of the DNS
>   adjustments, and in particular for taking care of the rollback when the
>   first attempt at switching failed (due to caching issues) allowing me to
>   catch my train.

I just clicked a few buttons ;-).

As an aside, I am really glad to be able to spin down our Heroku account
and for the opportunity to save the project some money. We're spending
about ~$60/mo USD on Heroku, and I'm glad to be able to put that money
to other uses that will benefit the project.

I haven't yet spun down the dynos on Heroku, on the off-chance that we
need to quickly get back to the non-static version of the site. But the
rollout has gone so smoothly that I doubt doing so will be necessary. In
a couple of days I'll go ahead and spin them down, assuming nothing has
changed.

> You will note that the site looks pretty similar to the version before,
> and this is of course intentional.
>
> There are subtle differences, though. For example, the site search is now
> language-dependent. Searching for "commit" when on a Spanish version of a
> manual page will find only matching Spanish pages:
>
> https://git-scm.com/search/results?search=commit&language=es

Sounds like an improvement to me ;-). Thanks again for all of your hard
work, Johannes.

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Taylor Blau]

On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 06:19:16PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> I haven't yet spun down the dynos on Heroku, on the off-chance that we
> need to quickly get back to the non-static version of the site. But the
> rollout has gone so smoothly that I doubt doing so will be necessary. In
> a couple of days I'll go ahead and spin them down, assuming nothing has
> changed.

I had a reminder in my personal calendar today to shut down our Heroku
account, which is now mostly done.

I de-provisioned all of our add-ons (which were the Heroku Scheduler,
Postgres, and Bonsai instances), and then deleted the app.

The only thing that is left is to actually delete the account itself,
which can't be done until our last invoice is cleared, which should
happen on sometime later today. Our final invoice is $61.86 USD. Once
that is cleared, I'll delete the account entirely.

(As an aside, this is a significant cost-savings for the project. Our
usual invoices are around $65 USD/mo, but that is taking into account
the OSS credits[1] that Heroku provides us, which are worth $40 USD/mo.
So the real cost-savings is somewhere around $1,200 USD/yr, which is
awesome.)

Thanks,
Taylor

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/ZZ7zezSRZfdklS4u@nand.local/

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Taylor Blau]

On Mon, Sep 30, 2024 at 12:11:06PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
> The only thing that is left is to actually delete the account itself,
> which can't be done until our last invoice is cleared, which should
> happen on sometime later today. Our final invoice is $61.86 USD. Once
> that is cleared, I'll delete the account entirely.

This settled yesterday, and I have deleted our Heroku account. The last
traces of the old Rails site are now gone for good!

Thanks,
Taylor

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Junio C Hamano]

Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> writes:

> On Mon, Sep 30, 2024 at 12:11:06PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:
>> The only thing that is left is to actually delete the account itself,
>> which can't be done until our last invoice is cleared, which should
>> happen on sometime later today. Our final invoice is $61.86 USD. Once
>> that is cleared, I'll delete the account entirely.
>
> This settled yesterday, and I have deleted our Heroku account. The last
> traces of the old Rails site are now gone for good!

Huge thanks to everybody involved in the effort.  Thanks.

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[brian m. carlson]

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On 2024-09-24 at 22:07:05, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).

This is great news, and I appreciate everyone's contributions here.  As
I said at the contributor summit, it's fantastic to see that we've
managed to preserve all the links, including the page fragments, which I
really appreciate since I've been trying to link the Git FAQ from
everywhere on the Internet.

Thanks again for all your work.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them or he/him)
Toronto, Ontario, CA

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Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Jeff King]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).
> 
> This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
> contributed:

Yay! A big thank _you_ for carrying it all through to completion.

I cowered in fear from the project on multiple occasions. And even when
you started working on it, I intentionally avoided getting involved
because I knew what a rabbit hole it could become. So I am doubly happy
that it was completed, and without me. :)

> As with all big efforts, I am under no illusion about everything working
> as intended, I do expect some fall-out to crop up (e.g. external links
> that might now be broken, even if I tried very hard to avoid that). I hope
> that the team spirit I described above invites more helping hands in
> getting those issues found and sorted out.

Yeah. One of the reasons I was so enthusiastic about switching is that
we'd routinely see small breakages with the old site (failing
translation imports, search index going belly-up, oops we need to move
to a new version of ruby which subtly breaks all sorts of things, etc).
People will generally open issues in the GitHub repo as they see things,
and I figured that even with a few rough edges the new site was probably
going to be more reliable than the old one.

-Peff

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Junio C Hamano]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).
>
> This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
> contributed:

Thanks, everyone.  It is great to see such a long-lived effort come
to successful completion.

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Toon Claes]

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

> This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
> contributed:

Amazing job everyone, it's really impressive!

> - Toon Claes for not only pointing out that the style sheet for the search
>   results needs fixing but also for fixing it right away,

I only wrote five lines of CSS, but thanks for having me take part.

> You will note that the site looks pretty similar to the version before,
> and this is of course intentional.

That's the best thing. Nobody's gonna know...

> There are also new things that have sprung up that are not caused by the
> migration to Hugo/Pagefind, for example some diagrams no longer shown (see
> https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/issues/1862) because the Google Charts
> API entered the Google Graveyard. Any takers?

Yeah, serving static images makes a lot more sense. Unfortanately I'm
not familiar with d3.js.

But I will have a look at the GitHub issue tracker if there's anything
else I can help out with.

-- 
Toon

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Patrick Steinhardt]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).
> 
> This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who
> contributed:

Thanks to all of you, and you specifically, Johannes! The new website
certainly feels pleasingly fast. And other than that I wouldn't really
be able to tell that anything changed -- awesome job!

Patrick

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Scott Chacon]

Hey,

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07 AM Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> after midnight).

Big thanks to everyone involved in making this happen. As I'm pretty
sure that nearly everything you've struggled valiantly to replace was
largely my Ruby stuff from a decade ago, I appreciate the effort to
move to something more stable and maintainable.

> There are also new things that have sprung up that are not caused by the
> migration to Hugo/Pagefind, for example some diagrams no longer shown (see
> https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/issues/1862) because the Google Charts
> API entered the Google Graveyard. Any takers?

So, I commented on this issue, but maybe this is a good thing to
discuss at the group level. The images on this page were comparing the
speed of common operations between Git and _Subversion_. Ugh. Who
cares now? I wrote all this stuff in the early days because those
among us old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall were still
using systems like Subversion then and I was trying to sell Git's
virtues. But now _everybody_ uses Git, there is no reason to sell it
anymore, especially versus something like Subversion.

The simple thing would be to solve issues like this by just removing
this specific content, but we could also work on a perhaps more
valuable project to rethink the website content entirely. Why are
people coming to git-scm.com? What information are they looking for?
How could we answer those questions most efficiently?

This is essentially what my first version of git-scm.com was trying to
do when I registered the domain and launched the first version 16
years ago as an alternative to git.or.cz:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/d411cc4a0807251035i7aed2ec9wef7e8f1b3ae4c585@mail.gmail.com/

But as I said, the answers to these questions are very different today
than they were 16 years ago.

The version I helped launch 12 years ago (essentially the exact same
site that exists there today) was trying to do the same thing -
determine what people are coming to the site for and give them that
information as quickly and easily as possible:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP2yMaJy=1c3b4F72h6jL_454+0ydEQNXYiC6E-ZeQQgE0PcVA@mail.gmail.com/

I would love to take another crack at this, I'm happy to put some
design resources and further engineering (built off the great work
Johannes has done here) into the project. It would be great to get
some feedback from this group as to what they think would be most
valuable for people today.

For example, I think the book contents and the man-page hosting has
been incredibly valuable. I still use those resources today from
Google searches. I feel like perhaps the Guides section could be
structured and presented better - there is some great documentation
there. I have been talking to Apress on and off about a third edition,
perhaps a revamp of that content is also overdue - the last edition of
that was published in 2014.

I think the entire "About" section should be totally rethought.

Perhaps adding something about different use cases - large files for
game development, etc. There is no mention of LFS or partial cloning
or anything here.

There is no information currently on any forge or hosting options,
which seems silly. I think at the time I was trying to avoid
"advertising" for GitHub, but it would be nice for people to know all
the options for hosting their code, just as we have a client section.
Even more CLI clients and tools, rather than just GUIs - things like
git-absorb, stacked git, etc.

Perhaps more videos - there is so much great content on YouTube we
could link to. Right now it's like Linus's talk, my old Google talk
and 4 Matt McCullough tutorials.

I would love to pull in Git Rev News as a blog on git-scm.com, and/or
link to Taylor's regular posts about what's new in the new versions.
It's such great content and would be nice to have more visible.
Honestly, this whole website would be nice to incorporate:
https://git.github.io/rev_news/

In the end, I'm happy to put some work into this, or perhaps work with
Johannes and Taylor and Matt and whomever else is maintaining the site
now.

Scott

Re: git-scm.com is now a static website

[Christian Couder]

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 10:42 AM Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07 AM Johannes Schindelin
> <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

> > almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with
> > https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating
> > Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that
> > is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home
> > page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday
> > (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it
> > after midnight).

Congrats and thanks for making it happen!

> The simple thing would be to solve issues like this by just removing
> this specific content, but we could also work on a perhaps more
> valuable project to rethink the website content entirely. Why are
> people coming to git-scm.com? What information are they looking for?
> How could we answer those questions most efficiently?
>
> This is essentially what my first version of git-scm.com was trying to
> do when I registered the domain and launched the first version 16
> years ago as an alternative to git.or.cz:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/d411cc4a0807251035i7aed2ec9wef7e8f1b3ae4c585@mail.gmail.com/
>
> But as I said, the answers to these questions are very different today
> than they were 16 years ago.
>
> The version I helped launch 12 years ago (essentially the exact same
> site that exists there today) was trying to do the same thing -
> determine what people are coming to the site for and give them that
> information as quickly and easily as possible:
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP2yMaJy=1c3b4F72h6jL_454+0ydEQNXYiC6E-ZeQQgE0PcVA@mail.gmail.com/

Thanks for your previous work on the website and for this background
information!

> I would love to take another crack at this, I'm happy to put some
> design resources and further engineering (built off the great work
> Johannes has done here) into the project. It would be great to get
> some feedback from this group as to what they think would be most
> valuable for people today.

Glad that you are willing to put more effort on the website!

> For example, I think the book contents and the man-page hosting has
> been incredibly valuable. I still use those resources today from
> Google searches. I feel like perhaps the Guides section could be
> structured and presented better - there is some great documentation
> there. I have been talking to Apress on and off about a third edition,
> perhaps a revamp of that content is also overdue - the last edition of
> that was published in 2014.
>
> I think the entire "About" section should be totally rethought.
>
> Perhaps adding something about different use cases - large files for
> game development, etc. There is no mention of LFS or partial cloning
> or anything here.

I agree that having content about those topics could help. It would
perhaps avoid companies and projects around Git duplicating such kind
of content on their respective websites.

> There is no information currently on any forge or hosting options,
> which seems silly. I think at the time I was trying to avoid
> "advertising" for GitHub, but it would be nice for people to know all
> the options for hosting their code, just as we have a client section.
> Even more CLI clients and tools, rather than just GUIs - things like
> git-absorb, stacked git, etc.

I think it would be a good idea to improve on this too, but care
should be taken to keep a level playing field for all tools, solutions
and companies.

> Perhaps more videos - there is so much great content on YouTube we
> could link to. Right now it's like Linus's talk, my old Google talk
> and 4 Matt McCullough tutorials.
>
> I would love to pull in Git Rev News as a blog on git-scm.com, and/or
> link to Taylor's regular posts about what's new in the new versions.
> It's such great content and would be nice to have more visible.

About Taylor's regular posts on GitHub's website, GitLab decided some
time ago to also have their own news about new Git versions:

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/07/29/whats-new-in-git-2-46-0/
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/04/30/whats-new-in-git-2-45-0/
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/02/26/gitlabs-contributions-to-git-2-44-0/
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/01/11/the-contributions-we-made-to-the-git-2-43-release/

That's because when writing for one company's blog, people tend to
overemphasize what that company contributed, and to emphasize less
what other companies (especially competitors) contributed. I think
this is normal and not specific to GitHub by the way.

Anyway if only GitHub's version of what happened would be shown by the
Git project, it would seem like the Git project would endorse it in
some ways which would not be fair.

> Honestly, this whole website would be nice to incorporate:
> https://git.github.io/rev_news/

I would have hoped it would be the whole https://git.github.io/ (Git
Developer Pages) site instead of just the Git Rev News part of it.
There are basically 3 parts to the Git Developer Pages: Git Rev News
related pages, the Hacking Git page and the mentoring program pages,
and I think it would not make much sense to move only parts of them to
git-scm.com as they are all related to trying to encourage people to
participate in Git's development. We could either move them all to
subsections of https://git-scm.com/community or perhaps create a high
level https://git-scm.com/developer or
https://git-scm.com/development. One big advantage in deprecating the
whole Git Developer Pages site would be to avoid issues with style
sheets, with layouts on mobile phones, etc on 2 different websites
instead of just one. We would need to keep the Git Developer Pages
site on for some time and add redirects for most pages of it though.

I have created the following issue to discuss this:

https://github.com/git/git.github.io/issues/729

but I am Ok with discussing it here if people prefer.

> In the end, I'm happy to put some work into this, or perhaps work with
> Johannes and Taylor and Matt and whomever else is maintaining the site
> now.

Thanks,
Christian.