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

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

I'm really excited to see this change (or really, lack of change, because the conversion was so seamless and faithful to the original design).

Thank you for sticking with this for all these years and seeing it through to the finish line. Congratulations to yourself and those below for all of the hard work that went into this!

I just clicked a few buttons ;-).

As an aside, I am really glad to be able to spin down our Heroku account and for the opportunity to save the project some money. We're spending about ~$60/mo USD on Heroku, and I'm glad to be able to put that money to other uses that will benefit the project.

I haven't yet spun down the dynos on Heroku, on the off-chance that we need to quickly get back to the non-static version of the site. But the rollout has gone so smoothly that I doubt doing so will be necessary. In a couple of days I'll go ahead and spin them down, assuming nothing has changed.

Sounds like an improvement to me ;-). Thanks again for all of your hard work, Johannes.

Thanks, Taylor

On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 06:19:16PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:

I had a reminder in my personal calendar today to shut down our Heroku account, which is now mostly done.

I de-provisioned all of our add-ons (which were the Heroku Scheduler, Postgres, and Bonsai instances), and then deleted the app.

The only thing that is left is to actually delete the account itself, which can't be done until our last invoice is cleared, which should happen on sometime later today. Our final invoice is $61.86 USD. Once that is cleared, I'll delete the account entirely.

(As an aside, this is a significant cost-savings for the project. Our usual invoices are around $65 USD/mo, but that is taking into account the OSS credits[1] that Heroku provides us, which are worth $40 USD/mo. So the real cost-savings is somewhere around $1,200 USD/yr, which is awesome.)

Thanks, Taylor

[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/ZZ7zezSRZfdklS4u@nand.local/

On Mon, Sep 30, 2024 at 12:11:06PM -0400, Taylor Blau wrote:

This settled yesterday, and I have deleted our Heroku account. The last traces of the old Rails site are now gone for good!

Thanks, Taylor

Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com> writes:

Huge thanks to everybody involved in the effort.  Thanks.

On 2024-09-24 at 22:07:05, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

This is great news, and I appreciate everyone's contributions here. As I said at the contributor summit, it's fantastic to see that we've managed to preserve all the links, including the page fragments, which I really appreciate since I've been trying to link the Git FAQ from everywhere on the Internet.

Thanks again for all your work.

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Yay! A big thank _you_ for carrying it all through to completion.

I cowered in fear from the project on multiple occasions. And even when you started working on it, I intentionally avoided getting involved because I knew what a rabbit hole it could become. So I am doubly happy that it was completed, and without me. :)

Yeah. One of the reasons I was so enthusiastic about switching is that we'd routinely see small breakages with the old site (failing translation imports, search index going belly-up, oops we need to move to a new version of ruby which subtly breaks all sorts of things, etc). People will generally open issues in the GitHub repo as they see things, and I figured that even with a few rough edges the new site was probably going to be more reliable than the old one.

-Peff

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Thanks, everyone. It is great to see such a long-lived effort come to successful completion.

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:

Amazing job everyone, it's really impressive!

I only wrote five lines of CSS, but thanks for having me take part.

That's the best thing. Nobody's gonna know...

Yeah, serving static images makes a lot more sense. Unfortanately I'm not familiar with d3.js.

But I will have a look at the GitHub issue tracker if there's anything else I can help out with.

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07:05AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Thanks to all of you, and you specifically, Johannes! The new website certainly feels pleasingly fast. And other than that I wouldn't really be able to tell that anything changed -- awesome job!

Patrick

Hey,

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 12:07 AM Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

Big thanks to everyone involved in making this happen. As I'm pretty sure that nearly everything you've struggled valiantly to replace was largely my Ruby stuff from a decade ago, I appreciate the effort to move to something more stable and maintainable.

So, I commented on this issue, but maybe this is a good thing to discuss at the group level. The images on this page were comparing the speed of common operations between Git and _Subversion_. Ugh. Who cares now? I wrote all this stuff in the early days because those among us old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall were still using systems like Subversion then and I was trying to sell Git's virtues. But now _everybody_ uses Git, there is no reason to sell it anymore, especially versus something like Subversion.

The simple thing would be to solve issues like this by just removing this specific content, but we could also work on a perhaps more valuable project to rethink the website content entirely. Why are people coming to git-scm.com? What information are they looking for? How could we answer those questions most efficiently?

This is essentially what my first version of git-scm.com was trying to do when I registered the domain and launched the first version 16 years ago as an alternative to git.or.cz:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/d411cc4a0807251035i7aed2ec9wef7e8f1b3ae4c585@mail.gmail.com/

But as I said, the answers to these questions are very different today than they were 16 years ago.

The version I helped launch 12 years ago (essentially the exact same site that exists there today) was trying to do the same thing - determine what people are coming to the site for and give them that information as quickly and easily as possible:

https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAP2yMaJy=1c3b4F72h6jL_454+0ydEQNXYiC6E-ZeQQgE0PcVA@mail.gmail.com/

I would love to take another crack at this, I'm happy to put some design resources and further engineering (built off the great work Johannes has done here) into the project. It would be great to get some feedback from this group as to what they think would be most valuable for people today.

For example, I think the book contents and the man-page hosting has been incredibly valuable. I still use those resources today from Google searches. I feel like perhaps the Guides section could be structured and presented better - there is some great documentation there. I have been talking to Apress on and off about a third edition, perhaps a revamp of that content is also overdue - the last edition of that was published in 2014.

I think the entire "About" section should be totally rethought.

Perhaps adding something about different use cases - large files for game development, etc. There is no mention of LFS or partial cloning or anything here.

There is no information currently on any forge or hosting options, which seems silly. I think at the time I was trying to avoid "advertising" for GitHub, but it would be nice for people to know all the options for hosting their code, just as we have a client section. Even more CLI clients and tools, rather than just GUIs - things like git-absorb, stacked git, etc.

Perhaps more videos - there is so much great content on YouTube we could link to. Right now it's like Linus's talk, my old Google talk and 4 Matt McCullough tutorials.

I would love to pull in Git Rev News as a blog on git-scm.com, and/or link to Taylor's regular posts about what's new in the new versions. It's such great content and would be nice to have more visible. Honestly, this whole website would be nice to incorporate: https://git.github.io/rev_news/

In the end, I'm happy to put some work into this, or perhaps work with Johannes and Taylor and Matt and whomever else is maintaining the site now.

Scott

Hi,

On Sun, Sep 29, 2024 at 10:42 AM Scott Chacon <schacon@gmail.com> wrote:

Congrats and thanks for making it happen!

Thanks for your previous work on the website and for this background information!

Glad that you are willing to put more effort on the website!

I agree that having content about those topics could help. It would perhaps avoid companies and projects around Git duplicating such kind of content on their respective websites.

I think it would be a good idea to improve on this too, but care should be taken to keep a level playing field for all tools, solutions and companies.

About Taylor's regular posts on GitHub's website, GitLab decided some time ago to also have their own news about new Git versions:

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/07/29/whats-new-in-git-2-46-0/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/04/30/whats-new-in-git-2-45-0/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/02/26/gitlabs-contributions-to-git-2-44-0/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/01/11/the-contributions-we-made-to-the-git-2-43-release/

That's because when writing for one company's blog, people tend to overemphasize what that company contributed, and to emphasize less what other companies (especially competitors) contributed. I think this is normal and not specific to GitHub by the way.

Anyway if only GitHub's version of what happened would be shown by the Git project, it would seem like the Git project would endorse it in some ways which would not be fair.

I would have hoped it would be the whole https://git.github.io/ (Git Developer Pages) site instead of just the Git Rev News part of it. There are basically 3 parts to the Git Developer Pages: Git Rev News related pages, the Hacking Git page and the mentoring program pages, and I think it would not make much sense to move only parts of them to git-scm.com as they are all related to trying to encourage people to participate in Git's development. We could either move them all to subsections of https://git-scm.com/community or perhaps create a high level https://git-scm.com/developer or https://git-scm.com/development. One big advantage in deprecating the whole Git Developer Pages site would be to avoid issues with style sheets, with layouts on mobile phones, etc on 2 different websites instead of just one. We would need to keep the Git Developer Pages site on for some time and add redirects for most pages of it though.

I have created the following issue to discuss this:

https://github.com/git/git.github.io/issues/729

but I am Ok with discussing it here if people prefer.

Thanks, Christian.