m101js

Weekly course notes from MongoDB University M101JS: MongoDB for Node.js Developers

About

This project is built using the Yeoman generator for AngularJS and deployed to github pages. This presents a slight challenge for deployment because GitHub wants to host the root of the "master" branch as the doc root, whereas yeoman wants your docroot to be hosted out of the "dist/". The solution to this is explained here and here.

Relative Links

Another challenge is getting the Angular generated relative links to work. For example, when developing locally using grunt serve, the root url is:

http://127.0.0.1:9000/#/

Now let's say you have a link such as:

<a href="/#/awesome">My Awesome Link</a>

Locally, it gets generated as:

http://127.0.0.1:9000/#/awesome

However, once the dist dir is pushed to gh-pages branch, the root url will be something like:

http://danielabar.github.io/m101js/#/

And the awesome link will be generated as:

http://danielabar.github.io/#/awesome

This is a problem because it won't be found. For Github Pages, the url should actually be:

http://danielabar.github.io/m101js/#/awesome

The solution I came up with is to use grunt-text-replace to modify all urls with /# to start with /m101js. The grunt task uses a regex to identify the urls, and a convenient callback function to do the replacement. It looks something like this:

replace: {
  dist: {
    src: ['<%= yeoman.dist %>/views/main.html'],
    overwrite: true,
    replacements: [
      {
        from: /\/#\//g,
        to: function(matchedWord) {
          return '/m101js' + matchedWord;
        }
      }
    ]
  }
    }

An improvement could be to replace m101js with a project variable to make the solution more generic. But overall, this feels a litle hack-ey, if anyone has a better solution, let me know.

Development

Startup grunt in preview mode

grunt serve

Make changes, for example, to add a new route to week3 course notes

yo angular:route week3

Add content to week3.html and link to it from main.html. Changes are automatically reflected in browser via grunt watch task.

Build

Run the grunt build task

grunt

If it succeeds, you're ready to deploy.

Deploy

The overall project is pushed to master branch, and git subtree is used to push the dist dir to gh-pages branch.

git add .
git commit -m "your message"
git push origin master
git subtree push --prefix dist origin gh-pages