Jasig CAS project documentation

The documentation is written in markdown then converted to HTML and PDF using a static site compiler written in Ruby called nanoc.

Installing Ruby + RubyGems

OS X
The latest and greatest package manager attempt on OS X is homebrew (skip straight to installation)

Once you have homebrew it's as simple as:

brew install ruby

Ubuntu
Follow these instructions here (you can skip the Rails section towards the bottom…)

Windows
The easiest way to install Ruby on Windows is RubyInstaller

Installing Bundler

With ruby good to go

ruby --version # => ruby 1.9.2p290

you can now install bundler, a ruby gem that helps manage a project's gem dependencies. Install bundler like any other ruby gem (may require sudo):

gem install bundler

Installing wkhtmltopdf

wkhtmltopdf (i.e. webkit html to pdf) is a simple shell utility to convert HTML to PDF using WebKit and QT. Click here for installation instructions.

Getting Started

1. Clone this repository

    git clone [email protected]:jdlich/cas-docs.git
   

2. From the project root, install gem dependencies via bundle

    cd cas-docs
    bundle install
   

   (NOTE: if the command is not found, make sure you have the rubygems bin folder in your path. It's going to be something like .../ruby/gems/1.9.2/gems/bin)

   (ALSO NOTE: if bundler stops because of a system dependency, make sure to run bundle install again after you have resolved the issue)

3. Build the project into a new directory called output/

    nanoc compile
   

4. Start nanoc's autocompile server which runs on http://localhost:3000

    nanoc aco
    # => localhost:3000
   

   (NOTE: the PDF generation is somewhat of a small bottleneck during compilation, but you can temporarily comment out the :pdfkit compile filter in the Rules file — or just deal with the extra few seconds.)

nanoc Filesystem Breakdown

• config.rb - Compass stylesheet framework configuration (compass is built on top of sass)
• config.yaml - nanoc configuration
• content - Source files (views, stylesheets, images, etc)
• Gemfile - Used with bundler to manage gem dependencies
• layouts - Content gets injected into HTML layout templates via ERB, a ruby templating language
• lib - Custom Ruby code that gets executed during compilation (anything goes, methods are magically available in your views and layouts)
• Rakefile - Ruby build tool. Run rake -T to see list of available tasks (equivalent to ant -p).
• Rules - Instructions for routes (URLs) and compiling (e.g. matching content with layouts, converting markdown to HTML, etc)

For more details, nanoc is really well documented here.

Markdown

markdown is one of many simple markup languages that allow you to write HTML without the pain of writing HTML. The syntax is very easy to learn.