Bevry News2015 Weeks 34, 35, 36

Now that I’m back from my hitchhiking adventure, I’ve had a lot of energy and time to put into the Bevry community, the last 3 weeks have been quite intensive in the updates that we’ve received, not just from myself, but from the entire community. Here’s what’s happened:

Cakefiles to Nakefiles

Previously our base files used CoffeeScript’s Cakefile for building, for instance `cake compile` would compile our project. Now continuing our migration from CoffeeScript to ES6+, we now use our own “Nakefile” system, here’s how it works.

Nakefiles are a standalone node file called `nakefile.js` which don’t have any other external dependencies while providing tooling for installing, compiling, testing, and releasing your project. Consider them like a cross-platform Makefile.

To get started with Nakefiles:

1. Add our base Nakefile to your project.
2. Add the optional npm run-script aliases.
3. Add/customise package.json:nakeConfiguration.
4. You may also want to add our base CONTRIBUTING.md file too.

This is a great move for our projects, and for all projects that want a light-weight cross-platform build system.

Heroku to GitHub Pages with Travis CI for Continuous Deployment

Heroku announced that in August they will require popular free applications to be offline for at least 6 hours a day. Bevry had been using Heroku for everything, utilising DocPad’s dynamic server abilities to perform regenerations in production of new documentation content. This announcement, partnered with the ocassional downtime such generations could cause, prompted us to move from Heroku to GitHub Pages, with Travis CI for Continuous Deployment. This migration completed incredibly succesfully. Our websites are now faster than ever thanks to production static serving and GitHub Pages powerful CDN network. They will also have permanent uptime now, thanks to every change to the website having to be tested first, and being generated locally rather than on the live production server.

We’ve updated our DocPad Deployment Guide with details on how to take advantage of this. We’ve also added a section on OpenShift deployment to it too, in case you still require dynamic servers.

New DocPad Releases

v6.78.2 and v6.78.3 are out, they break the multiple month gap between DocPad releases while I was taking my time off. These releases bring OpenShift support thanks to our new hostenv package, as well as minor improvements to our profiler support and hostname output.

Casper DocPad Skeleton

The beautiful Capser theme from Ghost is now available to DocPad users thanks to the work of DocPad user Drew Strickland who ported it over as an Official DocPad Skeleton. Which means besides just cloning it, it will also be an option when starting your next DocPad project.

Updated Projects

Other projects that have seen updates are Type Checker, Lazy Require, Safe FS and Ambi. All of which have been updated to ES6+, our new basefiles, and other smaller updates around that. They’ve also gotten rid of their `cyclic.js` file, which appears to be no longer needed thanks to updates to npm.

DocPad Extras has also been updated, which now includes automated testing of the integrity of the `exchange.cson` file that contains the list of the official DocPad Skeletons available for your disposal.

New Talks & Conferences

Our long-time DocPad user Łukasz Górnicki has been presenting his talk Documentation Continious Delivery at several conferences and meetups now, here’s the blurb:

My talk is about how we in hybris (SAP) use DocPad to generate devportal.yaas.io. where our whole YaaS is cloud solution based on microservices architecture. So how we enable our teams to deploy their documentation together with their service without CMS publishing nightmare.

Onwards, during my time off I gave a talk at BrisJS about Mental Health in Programming and my Hitchhiking Adventure. It’s now online.

Official Blogs

This Bevry Blog is now official, yep that means you can now access it at https://blog.bevry.me — we also now have an Official DocPad Blog at https://blog.docpad.org which is begging for content, so if you want to contribute articles get them on medium and submit them to that publication, submissions are warmely welcome.

Welcome to Slack

We’ve also updated our Official Support Channels to mention our new Bevry Slack Community. It’s going well, and we have several channels now with several active users. It’s a nice place to hang out with Bevry team members and Bevry users, while getting the latest news as it happens.

Fund our Roadmap on Patreon

We have a Bevry Patreon Page now. Needless to say, there are a lot of things planned for the future and we need funding to accomplish them. If you are an individual with some excess cash who wants to feel warm and fuzzy, or a company that depends on DocPad, consider donating/sponsoring the roadmap by giving on Patreon. We’d greatly appreciate it. If you sponsor high enough, you’ll even be listed at the bottom of these updates. Very cool.

What’s next?

We’ll continue our move from CoffeeScript to ES6+, as well as increase our support efforts through Slack. We’ll get a new helper service up and running, and move the Startup Hostel website to GitHub Pages as well. Then from there will be knocking off a few more of our Trello Cards, and then continuing with our Patreon Roadmap.

Want to help this Blog with editing or new blog posts? Let @balupton know in our Slack 😎

All the best,
Benjamin (founder of Bevry)