Migrate to Jekyll to take advantage of the incremental builds feature to allow for faster GitLab CI builds
I recently migrated Conversational Development from Middleman to Jekyll because:
- Jekyll has incremental builds which when incorporated into CI allows the build times to be significantly reduced as the site grows.
- Jekyll is the most widely supported and well known static site generator and blogging platform (it even runs on Windows with no hassle) allowing others to easily contribute.
Feedback on the migration
- The migration was quick (couple of hours) and easy for a small site like conversationaldevelopment.com. Considering the size of www-gitlab-com I suspect it will take at least a week to migrate.
- I chose to migrate the haml templates to erb, even though there are plugins to use haml in Jekyll, as I wanted to depend on less 3rd party gems. Choosing to this increased the work needed to migrate the site. I used a gem to convert haml to erb but still needed to manually edit templates to output variables different in each SSG. -conversationaldevelopment-com has nothing out of the ordinary in the build process where www-gitlab-com fetches content from other repos and generates PDFs.
Next steps for migrating www-gitlab-com to Jekyll
I suggest someone spends 1-2 hours gathering further non-standard steps in the www-gitlab-com build process and investigate possible solutions for the migration.
@JobV what do you propose the next steps should be?