Dave Pawson wrote:
Some desktop icon which runs a script to build
the entire site, stop on errors, then use
a command line ftp command to deploy to the host.
Here's how a Unix programmer (me) does it:
I use 'make' to build the pages on my web sites from some source. (I
use various template languages, but it could just as well be DocBook.)
The site copy I edit lives in a directory that the machine's local
Apache server is set up to serve so I can reload the page in a web
browser to check it, then I go back to the command line to say "make
synch" which runs rsync to copy the changes in the rebuilt site up to
the web server.
It would be trivial to set up a desktop icon to run these two non-GUI
steps in the background: one for "make all" and the other for "make
synch".
Here's a start at the Makefile to drive it:
DBX_SOURCES=$(shell find . -name \*.dbx -print | sort)
HTML_OUTPUTS=$(DBX_SOURCES:.dbx=.html)
HTML_SS=html-customization-layer.xsl
%.html: %.dbx $(HTML_SS)
@xmllint --postvalid --noent --noout $<
xsltproc $(HTML_SS) $<
html: $(DBX_SOURCES)
synch: html
rsync -lprtvD -e ssh --delete \
--exclude \*.dbx \
--exclude \*.xsl \
--exclude Makefile \
./ [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/var/www/html
The first two lines require GNU make on a Unix-like system. It'll work
fine on OS X, or on Windows with Cygwin installed. They map any *.dbx
file in the directory with the Makefile or anything underneath it to the
corresponding name with an .html extension. This saves you from having
to edit the Makefile any time someone adds a page. The cost is that the
'make' command runs a little slower than if you'd hard-coded everything,
but it only becomes noticeable with large sites.
The third line is for your HTML customization layer stylesheet.
Standard DocBook stuff.
The next group of lines tells make how to create *.html from *.dbx. If
the .dbx file or the HTML customization layer changes, the rule tells it
to rebuild the HTML file. Note that we do a "lint" step before the
build, to catch syntax errors.
Then we have the major web site building rule, the 'html' target.
Because it's the first named target, just saying 'make' is the same as
'make html', which builds the site's pages.
Finally, there's the 'synch' target, which ensures the 'html' target is
up to date, then it rsyncs the deltas up to the server. I only show
three --exclude rules here, but in practice I find that I need lots of
them for various reasons, which is why I break them out into one per
line. It makes the Makefile easier to read.
I manage several different sites with essentially this mechanism, and
have since before the bubble popped. For static sites, it works well.
Another advantage of using make is that a lot of GUI tools know how to
run it, and interpret the output. Your XML editor of choice may be able
to do this, so you wouldn't have to build desktop icons to drive this.
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