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How It Works

Rather than explaining the entirety of the stack, this document will explain the key parts of the Up-for-Grabs site and project.

Displaying projects

The main site is a Jekyll repository hosted on GitHub Pages, but it leverages some neat features of Jekyll along the way.

  • We use Data files to represent the projects listed on the site - one file per project, found under _data/projects
  • We convert this file to JSON inside javascripts/projects.json when the site is built using jekyll
  • The projectLoader module runs when the page is loaded, retrieving these projects and making them available for the site
  • The projectsService module handles the rest of the work to sort and search the projects
  • The main module handles the rest of the work to render the list of projects and provide the UI for filtering based on label or tags

Project Infrastructure

We've settled on some infrastructure choices that mean we don't need to worry about managing our own servers, and can save time on the manual work that comes with a project of this size:

  • GitHub Actions checks every time you build or create a pull request to make sure the project is ready to be deployed.
  • Netlify hooks check every pull request to test the deployment and give reviewers a preview of the changes, so they don't have to download and verify the changes locally.
  • When you push a commit to the gh-pages branch, a deployment is started to publish the latest code to GitHub Pages, which hosts the site
  • A GitHub Action runs weekly to scan the project list and remove any projects that are no longer active, by checking if they are still accessible via the GitHub API. This saves us from having to manually review projects for inactivity.
  • Every day, a GitHub Action checks each project and updates the data files with the latest commit statistics. This means that the statistics are always up-to-date when the site is published, so visitors can easily see which projects have available issues.