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How It Works

Rather than explaining the entirety of the stack, this document will explain the key parts of the Up-for-Grabs site and project.

Displaying projects

The main site is a Jekyll repository hosted on GitHub Pages, but it leverages some neat features of Jekyll along the way.

  • We use Data files to represent the projects listed on the site - one file per project, found under _data/projects
  • We convert this file to JSON inside javascripts/projects.json when the site is built using jekyll
  • The projectLoader module runs when the page is loaded, retrieving these projects and making them available for the site
  • The projectsService module handles the rest of the work to sort and search the projects
  • The main module handles the rest of the work to render the list of projects and provide the UI for filtering based on label or tags

Project Infrastructure

We've settled on some infrastructure choices that mean we don't need to worry about managing our own servers, and can save time on the manual work that comes with a project of this size:

  • GitHub Actions run on each build and pull request to validate the project is in a state where it can be deployed
  • Netlify hooks run on each pull request to test the deploy and provide a preview so that reviewers do not need to pull down and verify the changes locally
  • When a commit is pushed to the gh-pages branch, a deploy is started to publish the latest code to GitHub Pages, which hosts the site
  • A GitHub action runs weekly to scan the project list and cleanup any that have stale projects, by checking if they are still accessible via the GitHub API. This saves us time having to manually review projects for inactivity.
  • A GitHub action runs daily to check each project and commit statistics to the data files. This allows us to cache statistics each time the site is published and makes it easier for visitors to see which projects have available issues.