This contains all information needed for local development, which is encouraged when developing a course so you don’t have to wait for github to regenerate the course pages.
If you are just going to make quick, small edits you can skip the rest of this and go directly to Lesson X; edit on github.
If you are going to develop a full course or have to do extensive edits, it’s recommended to run jekyll locally. If you are just going to do a few small edits it’s probably easier to just edit diretcly on the github website.
Github pages uses jekyll which is a “static site generator”, what it does is take a bunch of source files, apply some transformations and create a HTML website from that. We use markdown files that are converted into HTML files for the site, there are also a few other files that are important for setting up the site. Images, pdfs and other smallish files can also be put directly in the repo.
Check git-scm.com for installation instructions in case you don’t already have it installed.
Jekyll itself is written in ruby, if you don’t have ruby installed yet (check
by typing ruby in a terminal). You have to first install that, it can be
found in all major package distribution systems.
To install ruby dependencies locally it’s a good idea to use
bundler, install that by typing gem install bundler at
the terminal.