Building and deploying my website with make

My workflow involves writing org-mode source files, compiling those to HTML before viewing, building the site, and pushing to GitHub pages. I need rules to do the following:

1. update

   • compile any new org source files to HTML

2. view

   • run update
   • start a server to view the website

3. deploy

   • run update
   • build website (using stasis)
   • run git commands to push it to GitHub pages.

Make runs shell commands, so the first things we need to do is figure out how to use emacs and org-mode to compile my website project from the command line.

At it's core, emacs is a lisp interpreter (and here). You can use it purely as an interpreter from command line like so:

emacs -batch -eval '(message "hello from emacs lisp")'
# "hello from emacs lisp"

the -batch flag causes emacs to run in non-interactive mode and without loading an init file (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BatchMode). It is typically used to run commands or emacs-lisp files as scripts. The -eval flag tells emacs to evaluate whatever lisp expression follows.

To publish this site with org-mode, I run M-x org-publish and select clj-site. The commands for clj-site are defined in my init file. To run this from the command line, we first need to set the variable org-publish-project-alist. While we could pass that as a string to -eval, it would be easier to define all the settings and variables I need in a small elisp file. This can be done in batch mode using the -load flag, followed by a file. I will copy my variable declaration from my init file and add a few other settings like so:

;; publish org-mode project from makefile 
;; based on: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46295511/how-to-run-org-mode-commands-from-shell
;; 
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/elpa/org-20191125")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/elpa/")
(add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/manual-packages")

(require 'org)
(require 'ox-publish)
(require 'ox-html)
;;(require 'htmlize)

(setq org-src-fontify-natively t)

(load-theme 'leuven t)

(setq org-publish-project-alist
      '(("programming"
         :base-directory "~/personal_projects/website-clj/resources/org-programming"
         :base-extension "org"
         :publishing-directory "~/personal_projects/website-clj/resources/programming"
         :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
         :headline-levels 4
         :html-extension "html"
         :body-only t)
        ("science"
         :base-directory "~/personal_projects/website-clj/resources/org-science"
         :base-extension "org"
         :publishing-directory "~/personal_projects/website-clj/resources/science"
         :publishing-function org-html-publish-to-html
         :headline-levels 4
         :html-extension "html"
         :body-only t)
        ("clj-site" :components ("programming" "science"))))

I named this file publish.el, and it lives in the base directory of the website (the place where I will run make from). Compiling documents in batch mode looks like this (from the base directory of my website):

emacs -batch -load publish.el -eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'

That was the hard part, now we just need to write some rules for make to run. We will name the first run update:

# Makefile
update:
	@echo "updating site..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'

The rule is called update. The @ prefix on the echo command stops the text of the command from being echoed to stdout before it is executed. We can now update the site by running:

make update

I start the ring web server for previewing my app by running lein ring server. To view my site before deploying, we can add the following command:

# Makefile
update:
	@echo "updating site..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'

view:
	@echo "updating site..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'
	@echo "Starting server to view website"
	lein ring server

make view will now update then display the site.

Deploying is slightly more complicated. To deploy, I need to run lein build-site, commit and push the changes, cd to the target/ directory and again commit and push the website changes. Make spawns a new shell for every line, but to run git commands we need to be in the appropriate directory. We can work with this by running all the commands in one line:

# Makefile
update:
	@echo "updating site..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'

view:
	@echo "updating site..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'
	@echo "Starting server to view website"
	lein ring server

deploy:
	@echo "deploying site."
	@echo "Updating now from emacs..."
	emacs -batch --load publish.el --eval '(org-publish "clj-site")'
# this will build and deploy the entire site
	@echo "building and pushing via git..."
	lein build-site;git add .;git commit -m "content update";git push;cd target/nickgeorge.net/; git add .;git commit -m "automated commit."; git push
	@echo "Done!"

With that we have our final rule, deploy.

Now I can run make deploy from the command line to publish my website, rather than running each command individually.