Current stack

1 minute

As you may know, Jekyll comes out of the box with Markdwon support through kramdown. Now, I don’t have anything against Markdown — I think its probably the best lightweight markup language out there. But I wanted something that had more fancy-pants features built-in, so I wouldn’t have to remember the correct HTML to match my CSS rules for making the elements display correctly. Some examples of built-in markups are: note admonition boxes, cited blockquotes, and PlantUML diagrams. (In setting up Jekyll to use Asciidoc, I also learned it supports mathematical formulas, Graphviz drawings, and other diagrams.)

Enabling Asciidoc support was fairly straightforward. I only had to add the jekyll-asciidoc and pygments.rb gems. However, since I also wanted to use the Graphviz, etc. diagrams, I also needed to add the asciidoctor-diagram gem as well as all of the diagramming programs' dependencies. That’s where the real trouble was. Eventually I figured out I needed to install Java, Graphviz, Python, and the {act,block,nw,seq}diag pip packages, so that everything will build properly on GitLab Pages.

You can see the git diff for setting up Asciidoc here. (I had poor commit hygiene so some extraneous changes are included too.)

Now that I have figured out the extra dependencies of using Asciidoc Diagram, I have another task on my todo list: creating a Docker image with all my dependencies already installed. This way GitLab doesn’t have to download and install all of them each time I push commits.

On the downside of getting all these features, I’ve noticed that generating the HTML files takes a bit longer. Previously, when using kramdown, generating pages would take couple hundred milliseconds. Now pages are taking close to one second to generate. I suspect this may become inconvenient if this site ever grows to many pages, but it shouldn’t matter much. Since I configured GitLab pages to generate all the static HTML pages at deploy-time, there is only a delay in deploying new content, not serving it to visitors.


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