Build profiles

It is common to be simultaneously working with different versions of a website, each of which needs to be built in slightly different ways. A common scenario is to have a local version of the site so that you can test it on your own machine, and a production version that is deployed to a server. In Salal, build profiles are used to store information about how to build and deploy the site in each case.

Build profile configuration files must be placed in a directory config/profiles. They have the same format as any other Salal config file. The name of the profile is taken from the name of the config file. For example, if you have a file config/profiles/production.json, you can use that profile by specifying production after the action when you run Salal, like python -m salal build production.

Within each section of the file, you can have a system subsection and a project subsection. Both are optional. The system subsection is for variables that control how Salal operates. The project subsection is for variables that you want available to the templating engine as your site is being built. A brief example will help illustrate the typical use of each.

You may have a set of templates, CSS styles, or other design elements that you'd like to be able to use on multiple sites. Salal supports that through the use of Themes. You tell Salal to use a particular theme for your project by defining a system variable theme_root, which points to the directory where the theme files can be found:

common
|---system
    |---paths
        |---theme_root: /home/mario/my_themes/cool_design"

Turning to project variables, suppose you have a Python backend for your site. As part of that, you have several Python scripts that are run to handle requests coming in from the client. These scripts need to indicate where the Python interpreter can be found. And it's in a different location on the test machine and on the server. That can be handled with a project variable. First, put a variable reference in your script files:

#!{{project.python_path}}

Then, specify the appropriate path for each profile in your project config file:

test
|---project
    |---python_path: C:/msys64/mingw64/bin/python.exe
production
|---project
    |---python_path: /home/sally/opt/python-3.6.2/bin/python3

This technique can also be used for building web pages, CSS, JavaScript scripts, or any other kind of file where you've configured Salal to do variable substitution. And it can sometimes be useful even when the value is consistent across profiles. For example, suppose all pages of a particular type should load a given CSS file. You could hard-code the URL for the CSS file in your page template. However, it may be better for maintainability to use a project variable instead. You can put something like this in your template:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{project.special_style_file}}" type="text/css" />

And then put this in your project config file:

common
|---project
    |---special_style_file: /css/style_for_sally.css