* Move the site from eleventy to hugo
The site is built by a single static binary. No node, no package manager,
no lockfile, and the toolchain it needed is gone: eleventy, tailwind,
postcss, markdown-it and its three plugins, date-fns, prism, npm-run-all,
cross-env and html-minifier-terser.
Hugo covers most of that itself. Chroma replaces prism, goldmark replaces
markdown-it, `--minify` replaces html-minifier-terser, and fingerprinted
asset URLs replace the cache-busting `version` shortcode that stamped
`Date.now()` into every stylesheet link.
`assets/styles.css` is hand-written, since tailwind was the only reason
left to keep a package manager. The palette and the light and dark values
are custom properties at the top of the file; the minified stylesheet is
15 kB against tailwind's 46 kB, and the whole build 1.0 MB against 1.2 MB.
It was matched to the old one by comparing computed styles rather than by
eye, which is how the heading weights and line heights, the list marker
colour, and the home page heading and sign-off were caught: the last of
those had been carried by tailwind utilities written into the markup.
The `::: note` container becomes a `note` shortcode taking the emoji to
show. Its closer needs a blank line after it, because a shortcode is not
a block rule the way `markdown-it-container` was, and without one goldmark
keeps the callout inside the open paragraph. The `overflow-x` wrapper
around tables and the heading anchors are goldmark render hooks.
Syntax guessing is off. Chroma detected a systemd unit file as gdscript
and a chat transcript as mysql, and colouring a snippet as the wrong
language is worse than not colouring it. The two chroma themes are scoped
to opposite sides of the theme switch rather than layered, because they do
not declare the same properties on the same tokens: github gives Error a
background github-dark never overrides, and styles Punctuation where
github-dark leaves it alone. Layered, either leaves a light value applying
on a dark page.
`[frontmatter] lastmod` resolves through git, then front matter, then file
modification time. Without that chain `.Lastmod` falls back to `.Date`,
which is zero when a page carries no date, and every page reads
`Jan 01, 0001`. `enableGitInfo` is off because the image build context is
`site/` alone, where hugo fails hard rather than degrading;
`HUGO_ENABLEGITINFO=true` gives real per-page commit dates locally.
Three fixes fall out of the move rather than being sought:
- `/docs/` redirected nowhere. The stub was a markdown file whose
permalink was a template expression while `markdownTemplateEngine` was
false, so it never rendered and the URL 404'd. It is an alias now
- `/docs/contributing/` pointed at `/docs/contributing/development/`,
which has never existed. It points at the backend page
- the 404 page was built to `/404/` and nothing served it. Hugo writes it
to `/404.html` and reproxy is told to use it
The mobile documentation menu is a checkbox and label. `visibility: hidden`
on the checkbox, which is what the old `invisible` utility set, takes it
out of the tab order, and a label is not focusable on its own, so the menu
could not be opened from the keyboard at all. The checkbox is clipped
rather than hidden, and its label shows a focus ring.
Content is unchanged. Every code block on every page is byte-identical to
the eleventy output; the only prose difference is that two example values,
`mysite.com` and a quoted `https://demo.remark42.com`, are no longer
turned into links, goldmark's linkify being narrower than markdown-it's.
`backend/README.md` and `frontend/apps/remark42/README.md` are symlinks
into the docs tree and follow it to `site/content/`, as does the path
`release.yml` watches. `frontend/CLAUDE.md` described the site as a node
and yarn project in four places.
* Keep the heading anchors markdown-it generated
Goldmark strips punctuation markdown-it kept, so 22 headings holding a
dot, slash, apostrophe, question mark, bracket or em dash would take a new
id and any link into one from outside the repository would stop resolving.
Those headings carry their previous id as well, as an empty target emitted
ahead of the heading by the render hook, from a map of content path to old
anchor in `data/anchor_aliases.json`. The map was built by matching
heading text between the two builds rather than by position, so it
survives a heading being added or moved.
The hook rather than markdown, because goldmark's `{#id}` attribute syntax
cannot express these: it accepts dots, apostrophes and em dashes but
treats a slash, a question mark, a bracket or a percent sign as heading
text, which is 11 of the 22. The ids are stored percent-decoded, since a
browser decodes a fragment before matching, so `#children%E2%80%99s-privacy`
finds `children’s-privacy`. Verified by navigating to the awkward ones
against the built image and measuring where the page settles: each lands
112px down, which is the header offset the target carries.
Three pages carried no title, so the docs template rendered an empty `<h1>`
above the heading their markdown already had. They take their titles from
that heading text, so neither the wording nor its anchor changes, and the
template's `<h1>` carries an id. One in-page link pointed at an anchor
goldmark no longer generates.
The heading render hook emits no permalink anchor. The one it replaced was
an empty `<a href>` with `pointer-events: none`, so it could not be
clicked, and its only job was a `::before` spacer that `scroll-margin-top`
on the heading already does. Being an `<a href>` it stayed in the tab
order, so every heading was an unexplained keyboard stop: eight on the
installation page alone. Fragment navigation still lands 112px down, clear
of the fixed header.
* Harden the site image build and its CI
The architecture guard could not fire. `${TARGETARCH:-amd64}` defaulted
before the `unsupported arch` branch was reachable, so a build without
buildkit put an amd64 hugo inside an aarch64 image and ran only because
Docker Desktop emulates it. Reproduced with `--build-arg TARGETARCH=`:
`/etc/apk/arch` reported aarch64 and `hugo version` linux/amd64. An empty
value is an error now. `Dockerfile.dev` had the same defect and no smoke
step to catch it, so it would have failed at `compose up`.
The hugo tarball is verified against the release's own `checksums.txt`,
and the match is asserted present before it is used: piping grep straight
into `sha256sum -c` left the guarantee resting on what the checker does
with empty input. Busybox exits 1 there, so it did fail closed, but
nothing in the line said so. Verified against a checksums file that does
not list the tarball: the build stops before the install.
Hugo exits 0 on an empty content tree and emits a two-page shell, which
would have been copied, pushed and deployed. The build asserts the home
page and a docs page exist.
`site/**` pull requests were never built. The only building job is gated
on `github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'`, so on a pull request every job
skipped and rendered in the checks list the same way a pass does, and the
image was first built on the run that also deploys it. A `validate` job
builds it with `push: false`, needing no secrets so it works on a fork.
`.github/dependabot.yml` watched `/site` for npm packages that are gone.
That entry is a docker one, which tracks the alpine base. It does not
track the hugo pin and cannot: the docker ecosystem reads `FROM`
references, and `ARG HUGO_VERSION` is a bare string in a download URL, so
that one is a manual bump and `site/README.md` says so.
`Dockerfile.dev` carries a `COPY`, so the dev image works without the
compose bind mount, and compose runs as the invoking user rather than
root, which on linux left root-owned `public/` and `resources/` in the
checkout.
Recorded in the backlog: `master` has `required_status_checks` off with an
empty check list, so the new job surfaces a red X and does not block a
merge. That is a settings decision rather than a code fix.
Dmitry VerkhoturovandGitHub
4c9ef37cf1