Archival

Why?

Websites have become a bit homogenous, and basic web skills have become fairly accessible. This project aims to make it very easy to build ultra-durable websites that will last a very long time with little to no maintenance, and that don't rely on trendy build tools.

More musings about how this came about on my blog:

https://jesseditson.com/the-simplest-cms-part-1

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'archival'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install archival

Usage

First, install archival by running gem install archival.

Then, create a new website:

archival create my-website

This sets up some basics. To see your local website, run archival run.

When you push an archival website to github, it will automatically build itself to the dist folder. To see this locally, run archival build.

For more information and documentation, check out the docs at https://archival.dev

Archival uses as few domain specific languages as possible, but doesn't reinvent the wheel. Outside of web standards, here are the technologies used in Archival:

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and the created tag, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

To point a local archival site at a local version, run inside the website dir:

bundle config local.archival /path/to/local/git/repository

Then comment out the archival dependency in Gemfile and add:

gem 'archival', github: 'jesseditson/archival', branch: 'main'

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/jesseditson/archival.