The Convergence Design Lab website
The Convergence Design Lab (CDL) website is split across two repositories. This repository contains the front-end of the site. The back-end is a headless WordPress, essentially an internal editing interface for the content of the site and an API for the front-end of the site. The front-end of the site is a single page app that queries this back-end to load in the dynamic content (e.g. project and resource pages).
The front-end is built with Gatsby - a framework for creating super fast websites using React.
This project uses the node and npm ecosystem to build the tool. Before attempting to install this project, make sure you have node installed. After that, clone this repository to your local machine, open up a terminal inside of the project folder and run
npm install
This will install the dependencies and make a .env file which contains environment variables (mainly needed for deploying, see deploying section).
To build the site and open up a local development server, open up a terminal inside of the project folder and run:
npm run dev
You will now be able to open a browser to http://localhost:8000/. Any changes you make to the source code will be live reloaded in the browser.
There are two main branches in this repository:
- "master" represents the latest version that has been released live.
- "develop" is the working branch where all features should be merged.
You can create your own branch off of develop, work on a new feature and then merge it back into develop when its ready. When a new release is tested and ready to be pushed live:
- develop should be merged into master.
- The deploy command can be run (see below).
Installing this repository should create a .env file. (If not, you can copy sample.env and rename it to .env.) Fill out the info in the .env file with credentials from Convergence, and then run:
npm run deploy
The front-end needs a litle server configuration so that:
- HTML & JS are never cached
- Dynamic work/resource pages are properly redirected
- A login route is created
- 404s are properly directed
See ./static/htaccess.sample for an example.