git-scm.com is now a static website

Hi all,

almost 400 weeks after Matt Burke started the process with https://github.com/spraints/git-scm.com/commit/60af4ed3bc60 of migrating Git's home page away from being a Rails app to being a static website that is hosted on GitHub pages instead, today marks the day when Git's home page at https://git-scm.com/ has finally moved. Or actually: yesterday (because I took so long writing this email that I ended up sending it after midnight).

This was truly a team effort, and I would like to celebrate everyone who contributed:

- Jeff King for nerdsniping Matt Burke to look into migrating the site to
  Jekyll,

- Matt Burke for the first spike that identified what would be easy and
  what would be tricky in said migration,

- Victoria Dye for working with me during the first hackathon and figuring
  out all the hard parts such as sorting and filtering the GUIs at
  https://git-scm.com/downloads/guis,

- Bjørn Erik Pedersen for his tireless work on Hugo, a static site
  generator that is fast enough to handle the amount of content on Git's
  home page within a reasonable amount of time (unlike Jekyll, sadly),

- Andrei Rybak, Pedro Rijo, Kaartic Sivaraam and Todd Zullinger for
  testing the site when it was still rough around its edges,

- Oswald Buddenhagen for pointing out that the auto-generated content
  needs to be tracked separately from the non-generated content,

- Todd Zullinger for suggesting to use an automated link checker,

- Matthias Aßhauer for reviewing (part of) that humongous 242-commits
  strong PR at https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/pull/1804,

- Liam Bigelow for writing the only client-side Javascript-backed search
  engine (called Pagefind) capable of dealing with the size of
  git-scm.com, and particularly for his patience and for his competent &
  kind assistance when I tried to adapt Pagefind to the needs of Git's
  home page, so that searching for Git's subcommands will find the
  corresponding manual pages first,

- Matthias Endler and Thomas Zahner for their extensive work on the link
  checker Lychee, including their outstanding help with my PR to support
  the extension-less URLs we want to see on git-scm.com,

- Toon Claes for not only pointing out that the style sheet for the search
  results needs fixing but also for fixing it right away,

- Taylor Blau and Jeff King for endorsing the work enthusiastically and
  suggesting to switch over already at the end of the Git Contributor
  Summit that took place at GitMerge '24.

- Taylor Blau for assisting in the switch, taking care of the DNS
  adjustments, and in particular for taking care of the rollback when the
  first attempt at switching failed (due to caching issues) allowing me to
  catch my train.

You will note that the site looks pretty similar to the version before, and this is of course intentional.

There are subtle differences, though. For example, the site search is now language-dependent. Searching for "commit" when on a Spanish version of a manual page will find only matching Spanish pages:

https://git-scm.com/search/results?search=commit&language=es

As with all big efforts, I am under no illusion about everything working as intended, I do expect some fall-out to crop up (e.g. external links that might now be broken, even if I tried very hard to avoid that). I hope that the team spirit I described above invites more helping hands in getting those issues found and sorted out.

There are also new things that have sprung up that are not caused by the migration to Hugo/Pagefind, for example some diagrams no longer shown (see https://github.com/git/git-scm.com/issues/1862) because the Google Charts API entered the Google Graveyard. Any takers?

Ciao, Johannes