Consider bundling everything except source as a standalone dependency

[adamu]

Hello. I just discovered Slate last week. It looks great and I'm experimenting with adopting it for a project.

One barrier to adoption we have is that it looks like a maintenance problem to keep up to date with the latest version. The reason is that the site-specific content in source/ is mixed with the default Slate content that we are not interested in maintaining. Once the repository is cloned, the local copy is effectively diverging from the official version forever, unless manually kept in sync.

It would be great if Slate could be bundled as a black-box service that takes the markdown template (or templates, when using includes) as an input, and outputs a static site. This way, whenever a new version of Slate is released, the slate dependency can just be bumped. There would be no need to maintain a local copy of the Slate source next to the template, and updating the slate version would be a one-line change (change the dependency version), rather than merging in the whole source.

For example, Slate could be bundled into a Docker image that accepted a template (or templates) as input, and produced the static site as output. This image could be pushed to Docker Hub. Then using Slate would be simply: fetching the docker image, and running docker exec with the template path. Updates to Slate would just require fetching the new image.

Docker is just an example. It's the separation of Slate source and customized content that I think would be a great improvement. Of course, we can customise this ourselves - but that takes a time and effort, and supporting it out of the box would probably help more people to easily make use of this project.

[MasterOdin]

Agreed on doing this. We've created https://hub.docker.com/r/slatedocs/slate which will be used to host images. I've included everything into the build, including the source directory as it allows people to have as fine or coarse grained mount as they want. If you only modify markdown files, then only have to mount at /srv/slate/source/index.html.md and /srv/slate/source/includes, etc.

The plan to use the image has also been simplified for both development and regular usage through an entrypoint, allowing for doing simply:

• docker run slatedocs/slate build (gives bundle exec middleman build, the build can also be omitted on the slate run)
• docker run slatedocs/slate serve (gives bundle exec middleman serve)

Further discussion on splitting up slate more and such I think would be best suited for slate v3 which will be rewritten in JS and allow for much cleaner toolchain stuff with it.