Apache DataFusion Blog Content

This repository contains the Apache DataFusion blog at https://datafusion.apache.org/blog/

Authoring blog posts

It is recommended to use one of the existing posts and follow the same format. There are a couple of important impacts on the publishing:

• The filename should match the YYYY-MM-DD-brief-title.md format. During processing we parse these filenames to extract the date.
• Images should link to "/blog/images/image-path.png" and not to a relative path.

Testing

There are two ways to preview your blog post before publishing the site. You can either locally build and test the site or you can use the auto staging feature of the CI system. To locally build the site on your machine, follow the docker instructions below.

To use the staging feature of the CI system, push a branch that starts with site/ and create a PR to merge this branch into main. When you do so, it will trigger a CI process that will build the site and push it to the branch asf-staging. Once this completes, the ASF infrastructure will auto publish this staged branch to https://datafusion.staged.apache.org/ It is important to note that this staging feature only works for branches on the main repo. If you are working on a forked repo, you will need to use the docker approach below.

The most recently run staging CI pipeline will be published to this site. If you need to republish any branch, simply rerun the Stage Site workflow.

Setup for Docker

To locally build and preview the site on your computer, you will need to build a docker container using these instructions:

git clone https://github.com/apache/infrastructure-actions.git
cd infrastructure-actions
docker build -t df-site-build pelican

Then within the directory that contains datafusion-site you can build and test the site using:

docker run -it --rm -p8000:8000 -v $PWD:/site --entrypoint /bin/bash df-site-build:latest
pelicanasf content -o blog
python3 -m http.server 8000

Navigate in your web browser to [http://localhost:8000/blog] to view the live website. In your terminal you can press Ctrl+C and rerun the last two commands to rebuild and publish the site.

Publish site

The site publishes using a GitHub action provided by the ASF Infrastructure team. See the ASF-Pelican site for most details on how this process works.

To preview your site live, create a branch named site/my-feature-x. This should auto-publish to https://datafusion.staged.apache.org/

When you are satisfied with the staged branch, merging into main should cause the site to build via github actions and publish.

Check site status

The website is updated from the asf-site branch. You can check the status at ASF Infra sitesource

Updating Dependencies

The JavaScript and CSS files included in this repository are based on the example from the ASF Infra and modified slightly for our purposes. If you need to update these, the core libraries to use are

• bootstrap you can simply download the latest bundled minified version and css file. You will want to also include the associated .map file. This is an common library used to provide a host of useful JavaScript functions for websites.
• highlight.js provides the code colorization for the blog posts, making them more readable. To generate a new highlight package, you can use the generator tool. When you download this package, you will want to extract the full js file, not the minified file or you will not get all of the functionality you need.
• font awesome provides a variety of improved fonts for readability. You can simply update the provided css files.
• In addition to these dependencies, we have some custom CSS files to improve the site layout. You can edit these files directly.