PL Club Website

Build instructions

Dependencies

The following dependencies are required to build the website:

• GHC, the standard Haskell compiler
• cabal-install, a Haskell package management and build system. (This package provides the command-line utility cabal.)
• make
• bibtex2html, used to compile a list of PL Club publications from a set of .bib files.
• pkg-config, required to build some of the Haskell dependencies

You may also require a working installation of Alectryon to build blog posts that rely on Alectryon. However, Hakyll and Alectryon intelligently generate cache files which then get checked into the git repository, so Alectryon is only required to build new blog posts for the very first time. Even a clean rebuild of the site should not require Alectryon unless new literate Coq blog posts are added.

Building and deploying

• cabal build to build the Haskell package that actually generates the HTML
• cabal exec site -- build to build the website HTML. This creates a local cache of the generated files.
• cabal exec site -- rebuild to clear the local Hakyll cache (except Alectyon-generated files) and build the site from scratch
• cabal exec site -- deploy to deploy the site to the public internet via ENIAC

Deploying the generated site to the internet requires SSH access to the plclub account on ENIAC. This can only be performed from the university network, so you need to connect to the university VPN first if you are off campus. SSH access to ENIAC is limited, of course. If you think you require SSH access, ask the website maintainers.

Building with Nix

A Nix flake is provided. Currently, nix develop should drop you into a shell suitable for running the above commands. Be prepared to wait a long time during the first site build.

Build instructions

FAQ

How do I talk to about...?

Questions about the content of the website are best directed to Cassia Torczon. Questions about the website itself are best directed to Lawrence Dunn. When in doubt, ask in the #website channel on the PL Club Slack.

How do I contribute?

Information about contributing is a work in progress. When that information becomes written up, it will be found in the Wiki.

You can always ask the friendly maintainers in the #website channel on the PL club Slack.

Where is the old website?

Work on the current version of the website began late November 2019, with deployment around February 2020. The previous version (as seen on the Wayback machine) had been in service for about 15 years and used OMake and Java. A tar archive of the old website can be found in the home directory of the plclub user on ENIAC.

Where do I find the PL Club logo?

The nicely formatted SVG logo was created by Daniel Wagner to replace an earlier PNG version of unknown provenance. The SVG logo, as well as large and small PNG files rendered from it, are found under img/.

The original PL Club logo is at least as old as the website itself, so around since at least 2005.