Webweaving workflows

[netizen]

Hi, this can be a thread for talking about workflows in updating a website, i.e. editing files on your computer and then pushing those changes to your website. To start off I'll post my situation and ask for advice.

As it stands, my current website workflow involves:

1. Writing and/or updating source files
2. Compiling them with a SSG into HTML/CSS/JS
3. SSHing into my website's directory and uploading my changed files

However, I find this workflow to be very tedious. SSHing is slow and sometimes I spend too much time having to wrangle Pageant for keypair authentication. Uploading files via SSH is also very slow. I use WinSCP, and the interface for that can be kind of hard to work with at times. It's also difficult to view the source code on the website like this, as I have to use WinSCP's interface as opposed to a code editor.

I'm sort of avoiding Neocities because uploading an entire repository of nested directories, it can mess up BADLY, especially since all of my output HTML files have the name "index.html" for cleaner URL pathing. They tend to "collapse" the subdirectories to a single level, and overwrite all but one of the uploaded html files in doing so.

I'm considering using GitHub Actions(?), but I'm not quite sure how it works. I would like to upload my SSG's files to a GitHub repository, and then whenever it updates, it automatically compiles the website and then uploads those changes to my web host. However, I don't want to use GitHub pages, and I'm not sure how to get the resulting files onto the site. I use Namecheap's hosting for this, which comes with cPanel, and Eleventy as my SSG of choice.

I would love to hear how other people update their website, personally.

[sixeyes]

I used to use FTP and later SSH. When i used linux there was some tool to mount a remote SSH server as a local filesystem, and i would just edit those files directly. Very neat, but it would mean there wasnt a local copy.

I would sometimes also just SSH in and edit the files directly in vim.. (on my phone no less. UX is my passion)

These day's it's one big git repo. I have a local copy, edit that, commit changes, push them to the server. ((Since you cant push to the checked out branch, on the server i keep a different branch checked out, that i continuously rebase onto the main one to reflect any changes))

There's a little plan im entertaining to use some git hook thing to generate RSS automatically from the commit messages, could be neat

[DaGrandDragonn]

I’m one of those “neocities browser editor” coders. Mostly because it’s convenient to use my iPad. Unfortunately I have literally no inspect element tools lol. It’s why the site has, eh, I dunno, a zillion edits to it!

It’s really not that bad.

Sometimes I use my notes app to edit pieces of code though.

When it comes to the creation process, I usually start with a header, then a center container, and build from that. But I have a template for my sites already- I have one page called “template” and some shared css and whatever and whenever I want a new page I just copy the template over. It’s nice- I spent a lot of time optimising and making my stuff all nice and easy for me to use. I have JavaScript to load certain parts so I don’t have to edit all my pages. It’s a really good tool.

[glacial_pace]

i usually

1. push new code up to github
2. when i want to make my changes live, create a release on github and tab it with a vX.X.X format
3. ssh into my server and pull down the latest release
4. run a docker command to build my code inside a docker container, so i can sure the site runs exactly the same way it does on my local machine

i want to eventually automate step 3 and 4 so that i don't have to ssh in manually and i can just have github actions do it for me