Deployment

For deploying the website, create a personal account on the webserver and setup write access of this account to the webserver directory (e.g. /srv/www/vhosts/www.exim.org/).

Create a (bare) Git repo in this account and install this hook as a hook (don't forget the x-bit).

For Website Updates simply push to this Git repo.

More documentation

File      : README          - This file
Directory : docbook         - Contains docbook/XML source for many releases of documentation
Directory : script          - Contains build scripts
Directory : templates       - All the XSL templates and other required files
Directory : templates/doc   - templates for generating HTML from docbook/xml documentation
Directory : templates/web   - Contains all other web content
Directory : templates/i     - required images
Directory : templates/howto - Howto documentation source
File      : templates/wrapper.xsl   - The HTML wrapper. The stuff that's common across all web pages

script/gen does all the magic. Run it with no arguments to get a list of options. It takes the stylesheets wrapper.xsl, and those inside the "web" and "doc" directories and creates a website from them. You also tell it where to find spec.xml and filter.xml and it will create the documentation pages from that. Here are some examples:

Example 1:

  script/gen --latest 4.72 --web --tmpl templates --docroot /var/www/

This copies all of the files from the "templates/web" directory into "/var/www/". When it comes across .xsl files, it generates html from them instead. For non .xsl files, if the last-modified timestamp of the file is the same as the one already in /var/www/ it's ignored.

Example 2:

  script/gen --latest 4.72 --spec docbook/*/spec.xml \
    --tmpl templates --docroot /var/www/

If there are multiple spec.xml files in "specs/*/" for different versions of the documentation, this command will generate the appropriate webpages in /var/www-exim-html-$VERSION/. spec.xml contains the version number it's self, so it uses that in $VERSION

Example 3:

  script/build /var/www/

Generates everything into output directory /var/www Look at the script/build for details - it is just a wrapper around script/gen

All of the above examples make sure the exim-html-current symlink is kept in place. When a new version of Exim is released, we need to generate the new spec and filter documentation, and update the main web pages to reflect the new version number. That would be as simple as running a command like that in Example 4, with the latest version number, and just for the latest spec.xml and filter.xml files.

If you wanted to, for example, add a new link to the navigation bar on all pages, you would need to re-generate all web pages. This is a drawback of having a static website without frames. You would only need to edit one file though, specifically wrapper.xsl. Once that is done, you would run gen with --web, --spec and --filter, providing the filter.xml and spec.xml files for every piece of online documentation.

--latest should always specify the current stable version of Exim. Even if you're generating documentation pages for an older version. The script needs to know what the current version of Exim is, as it is mentioned in several places on the website, and is also needed to create the correct symlink for exim-html-current.