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Steve Barber edited this page Aug 5, 2020 · 6 revisions

Using pages.nist.gov (for NIST staff)

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Because of all the problems with supporting Gemfiles and use of bundler, I have now disabled use of bundler on the pages server. Jekyll will now be called directly and there is no way to request specific gem versions anymore.

If you experience any problems with this, please create an Issue at https://github.com/usnistgov/pages-root/issues or contact pages@nist.gov. I manually tested a few of the sites that had Gemfiles and they still seemed to be building just fine. Note that I have not updated the rest of the Wiki with this change yet, until I'm sure it doesn't hurt anything.

What is Pages?

The NIST Pages service (pages.nist.gov) is an approximation of the service provided by GitHub Pages (github.io). GitHub Pages does not conform to various federal government and NIST-specific IT security policies; in particular it does not require https access, and the information is not provided from a nist.gov DNS domain or SSL certificate among other things.

GitHub Pages and NIST Pages both provide automatic web publishing of static content hosted in a specific branch of your GitHub repository. Whenever you push a commit to that branch the corresponding web content will be automatically and immediately updated.

Both services use Jekyll as a templating preprocessor to make it easy to generate consistently themed and formatted web pages.

NIST Pages is a best-effort approximation of the GitHub Pages functionality. It is a fork of the 18F pages-server code base that has been extended with new features and customized for NIST's use cases over time.

Can I publish my stuff on pages.nist.gov?

If you and your repo are part of the USNISTGOV organization on GitHub and your repository is public then technically yes it can be published on pages.nist.gov, however you must first obtain approval from your laboratory's Information Coordinator (IC) to validate that you have an acceptable use case, that your information is releasable, and that your site conforms to NIST public web site branding requirements (headers, etc.) and policies.

If you are not yet a GitHub USNISTGOV organization member, please first see https://github.nist.gov/ for the Rules of Behavior form that must be filled out and submitted, and further instructions.

What should I NOT publish on Pages?

  • Sites requiring high availability (little to no down time). Pages is a simple single server intended to supply low-criticality data and information. It could go down for updates at any time.
  • Sites with dynamic pages (contents computed on the server side on the fly) cannot be hosted on Pages.
  • Information that has not been approved for release by your information coordinator (IC) should not be put on Pages.
  • Do not use it for random file sharing! Everything on Pages should be part of a GitHub repo that corresponds to a legitimate NIST project.
  • No personal files.
  • No Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
  • Pages is only authorized for low sensitivity, low availability, and low integrity information.
  • As one public face of NIST, sites on Pages should represent NIST well; e.g. look professional, adhere to the PAO site branding guidelines, be as accessible as possible, and provide useful data in a useful way.
  • Please refrain from leaving incomplete Pages sites set up. If they're no longer needed or not working, remove the repo, or move aside the nist-pages branch until you can complete it.
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