Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD): Customizing Your Workshop's Website

Configuration File _config.yml

You should edit the _config.yml configuration file in the root directory of your workshop to configure some site-wide variables and make the site function correctly:

• carpentry - to tell us which carpentry workshop this is, possible values are (“swc”, “dc” or “lc”)
• title - overall title for all pages
• workshop_repo - the URL of your workshop repository on GitHub
• workshop_site - the repository’s GitHub Pages URL

For example, if the URL for the repository is https://github.com/gvwilson/2015-07-01-miskatonic, the URL for the website will be http://gvwilson.github.io/2015-07-01-miskatonic.

You should not need to modify any of the other values in _config.yml.

Home Page: Data

Your workshop’s home page lives in index.md, which must define the following values in its header:

• layout must be workshop.

• carpentry must be either “dc” (for Data Carpentry), “swc” (for Software Carpentry) or “lc” (for Library Carpentry).

• venue is the short name of the institution or group hosting the workshop, like “Euphoric State University”. It should not include the address or other details, since this value is displayed in a table on the main Software Carpentry website.

• address is the workshop’s address (including details like the room number). The address should be all on one line.

• country must be a two-letter ISO-3166 code for the country in which the workshop is going to take place, such as “fr” (for France) or “nz” (for New Zealand) - see Wikipedia for a complete list.

• language is the language that will be used in the workshop. It must be an ISO 639-1 code. Note that two-letter codes mean different things for countries and languages: “ar” is Arabic when used for a language, but Argentina when used for a country.

• latlng is the latitude and longitude of the workshop site (so we can put a pin on our map). You can use this site to find these values. You can not put spaces around the comma separating the latitude from the longitude.

• humandate is the human-friendly start and end date for the workshop. Please use three-letter month names and abbreviations (e.g., Jul instead of July), since these values are displayed in a table on our websites. (Strictly speaking this information is redundant, since we require a machine-readable startdate and enddate, but reliably translating those into human-readable dates is an interesting challenge…)

• humantime is the human-friendly start and end time for each day of the workshop, e.g., “09:00 am - 4:00 pm” or “09:00-16:00”. (We recognize that we ought to allow different start or end times on different days, but going down that path leads eventually to embedding iCal date/time specifications in our headers, which in turn leads to madness…)

• startdate is the workshop’s starting date in YYYY-MM-DD format, such as 2015-07-01. You must use four digits for the year and two each for the month and day.

• enddate is the workshop’s ending date in the same format. If your workshop is only one day long, the enddate field should be deleted. If your workshop has a more complicated schedule (e.g., a half day a week for four weeks), please delete the enddate field and only tell us its start date.

• instructor is a comma-separated list of instructor names. The list must be enclosed in square brackets, and each name must be in double quotes, as in ["Alan Turing","Grace Hopper"]. Do not include other information (such as the word “instructor”) in these values.

• helper is a comma-separated list of helper names formatted in the same way as the instructor names. If there are no helpers, use an empty list [].

• contact is the contact email address to use for your workshop. If you do not provide a contact email address, your website will display the address for the workshop coordinators (who probably won’t be able to answer questions about the specific details of your workshop).

The header may optionally define the following:

• etherpad is the URL for the Etherpad for your workshop. If you are not using an Etherpad, you can delete this line. You can create a carpentries etherpad here.

• eventbrite is the multi-digit Eventbrite registration key. If you are using Eventbrite, the Software Carpentry administrators will give this to you. If you are using something else, you may delete this line. Note: this value must be given as a string in double quotes, rather than as a number.

Home Page: Schedule and Syllabus

You should edit the sections titled Schedule and Syllabus so that they show what you’re actually planning to teach and when. These files are located in the appropriate workshop folder (dc, lc or swc) inside the _includes folder.

Home Page: Setup

You should delete the pieces of the Setup section related to software you will not be using in your workshop, so that learners don’t spend time installing software they don’t need.

Setup: Installation tests

If you intend to use the installation-test scripts, uncomment the paragraph linking to setup/index.html in index.md and edit setup/swc-installation-test-2.py as described below.

swc-installation-test-1.py is pretty simple, and just checks that the students have a recent enough version of Python installed that they can run swc-installation-test-2.py.

swc-installation-test-2.py checks for a list of dependencies and prints error messages if a package is not installed, or if the installed version is not current enough. By default, the script checks for pretty much anything that has ever been used at a Software Carpentry workshop, which is probably not what you want for your particular workshop.

Go through swc-installation-test-2.py and comment any dependencies you don’t need out of the CHECKS list. You might also want to skim through the minimum version numbers listed where particular dependencies are defined (e.g. ('git', 'Git', (1, 7, 0), None)). For the most part, fairly conservative values have been selected, so students with modern machines should be fine. If your workshop has stricter version requirements, feel free to bump them accordingly.

Similarly, the virtual dependencies can be satisfied by any of several packages. If you don’t want to support a particular package (e.g. if you have no Emacs experience and don’t want to be responsible for students who show up with Emacs as their only editor), you can comment out that particular or_dependency.

Updating the repository

If for some reason, such as the installation instructions having become disconnected with the current lesson material, you need to get changes from this repository into the clone of it with your workshop page, please follow the steps below:

1. Add the workshop-template repository as upstream:

   $ git remote add upstream https://github.com/carpentries/workshop-template.git
   

2. Fetch the data from upstream repository (also know as the workshop-template repository):

   $ git fetch upstream
   

3. Merge the new changes:

   $ git merge upstream/gh-pages
   

4. When get conflicts, solve it and

   $ git commit -a
   

5. Push the changes to GitHub:

   $ git push origin gh-pages