CMSC398W: Practical Tools for Efficient Development

Course site for CMSC398W, built with Astro and Starlight. Deployed at https://cmsc398w.github.io/course_docs/.

Local Development

Prerequisites:

• Node.js 22+
• Emacs (for building slides from .org sources)
• TeX Live with XeLaTeX (texlive-xetex, texlive-latex-extra, texlive-latex-recommended, texlive-fonts-recommended, texlive-extra-utils)
• BeamerReveal Perl module (cpanm BeamerReveal)
• poppler-utils and ffmpeg (used by BeamerReveal for PDF/video processing)

Install Node dependencies:

npm install

Build slides (generates HTML/PDF from .org sources):

bash scripts/build-slides.sh

Run dev server:

npm run dev

Build for production:

npm run build
npm run preview

Project Structure

slides/          # Org-mode Beamer slide sources + images
scripts/         # build-slides.sh, export-slides.el, beamer-reveal.sty
src/
  content/docs/  # Starlight markdown/MDX pages
  components/    # Astro components (e.g. SlideEmbed)
public/          # Static assets; slides are built into public/slides/

Deployment

Pushes to main trigger the GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/deploy.yml), which:

1. Installs Emacs, TeX Live, BeamerReveal, and supporting tools
2. Compiles org-mode slides to PDF and reveal.js HTML via build-slides.sh
3. Builds the Astro site with npm run build
4. Deploys to GitHub Pages