Lightning Sites gives you beautifully simple deployment for your ~/Sites folders, inspired by Fastlane. We support all deployment setups, such as:

• Single developer and push when done

  [LOCALHOST] ----deploy---> [PRODUCTION]
  

• The way you shouldn't edit PHP websites (but people do it anyway)

  [LOCALHOST] <---promote/demote---> [PRODUCTION]
  

• Version-controlled with a build step

  [SCM] <-push/pull-> [LOCALHOST] --build-> [STAGING] --deploy-> [QA/PRODUCTION]
  

You set up each site with a simple rakefile and customize as necessary. Then you can perform powerful tasks quickly, including validation, backups and even SEO tasks.

The easiest way to to use Lightning Sites is to clone the example repository. It is a one-page website, about horses, and includes everything a modern website should have. You do NOT need to be a programmer to use that template, it is very end-user friendly. Click the link and see the features checklist if you are interested.

Create a Gemfile and add lightning_sites to it

source "https://rubygems.org"

gem "lightning_sites"

And install with:

gem install bundler
bundle install # this takes <10 minutes the first time

Next, create a Rakefile by starting with this and editing server credentials:

abort('Please run this using `bundle exec rake`') unless ENV["BUNDLE_BIN_PATH"]
require 'lightning_sites' # https://github.com/fulldecent/lightning-sites

@build_excludes.push('README.md','LICENSE','CONTRIBUTING.md')
production_base = 'horseslov@172.16.11.23:'
@remote_dir = "#{production_base}www"
@backup_targets = {
  'www' => "#{production_base}www",
  'logs' => "#{production_base}logs"
}

desc "Perform website build"
task :build => ['rsync:copy_build', 'git:save_version']

desc "Perform all testing on the built HTML"
task :test => [:build, 'html:check']

desc "Publish website to productions server"
task :publish => ['rsync:push']

• Update .gitignore to include tmp, BUILD/ and BACKUP/
• Update _travis.yml to call bundle exec rake test, see full example here
• Update Jekyll excludes in _config.yml, if you have one, then exclude these new files and gitignores

Here are the amazing new commands you can use right away.

bundle exec rake build
bundle exec rake test
bundle exec rake publish

Here is the full list of tasks. This list comes up by default when you run bundle exec rake.

rake git:pull                  # Incorporate changes from the remote repository into the current branch
rake git:save_version          # Save the commit hash to VERSION in the build directory
rake git:stale_report          # Print the modified date for all files under source control
rake git:status                # Display paths that have differences between the index file and the current HEAD commit
rake html:check                # Check everything with htmlproofer that is reasonable to check
rake html:check_onsite         # Check HTML with htmlproofer, skip external links
rake html:find_external_links  # Find all external links
rake jekyll:build              # Build Jekyll site
rake jekyll:test               # Run a Jekyll test server
rake rsync:backup              # Backup items from remote server
rake rsync:copy_build          # Copy the source directory to the build directory, excluding some files
rake rsync:pull[remote]        # Bring remote files to build directory (use rsync-style paths)
rake rsync:push[remote]        # Send build directory to remote server (use rsync-style paths)
rake seo:find_301              # Find 301s
rake seo:find_404              # Find 404s