Setting up access for lab website editing

Created in November 03, 2025 by Shai Revzen

2025

Overview

Obviously, there are multiple levels of safety controls on the content that appears on our public website.

  1. Our website is STATIC – whatever interactivity it offers is entirely client-side. This means there is very little attack surface for hackers.
  2. This static content is generated using the broadly used al-folio template for Jekyll, a well-tested open-source static website generator. Additional public code repositories are merged into this static website, and then it is rsync copied into the live server.
  3. Nobody except Prof. Revzen has access to the staging server.
  4. The source of the website in the staging server is under git version control in the tir:BIRDS-website repository, making it easy to roll back changes and merge changes from multiple sources.
  5. Unless you are intended to be a website maintainer, that repository should be invisible to you.

Preparing to Edit the Website

If you are planned to be a website maintainer, you should do the following (instructions for UBUNTU 24.04 only):

  1. Make sure you have the ruby-full package installed sudo apt install ruby-full
  2. Installed the ruby bundler gem (“gem-s” are ruby packages). gem install –user-install bundler
  3. Make sure the bundler code is available to be executed in your execution PATH ln -s $HOME/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.0.0/bin bin echo ‘export PATH=$PATH:~/bin’ » ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc
  4. Get the website source (NOTE: you will need about 2GB free for this). I assume you already have access to tir via instructions in tir:BIRDS-website. git clone tir:BIRDS-website
  5. Install all the needed parts of jekyll cd BIRDS-website bundle install
  6. Test (you need to be in the BIRDS-website folder) ./do_site local
  7. Assuming you got a message like “Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 (http://0.0.0.0:8000/)”, you should now be able to see your local version of the site at localhost:8000.

Editing

If everything was set up correctly when you were given access, you should have branch names which you are allowed to work on. Typically this will be uniqname/something where uniqname is your UMich Uniqname, and /something is specific to what you are working on. You can check out that branch with

git checkout uniqname/something

If this is your first time working on this branch, it should tell you something about tracking origin/uniqname/something. You are now ready to work. You can see what it looks like with ./do_site local .

Every few hours, and at the end of a day’s work, remember to commit and push your changes!