The Apache Creadur project, the community that develops Apache Rat, hosts its website on the ASF Content Management System. Apache Maven builds Rat, and generates this subsite. Here's (one way) to work with these systems.
Build and generate the site using Maven the usual way. A plain 'site' does not generate a fully complete page, thus:
mvn clean site site:stage
This will generate a complete page under 'target/staging'.
Make your changes to the site.xml and/or .apt files then launch a server on localhost:8080 using
mvn site:run
Review localhost:8080 using a browser, and do more edits. You'll see your changes as soon as you refresh the page.
As soon as your changes look okay locally on localhost:8080, commit them. Buildbot will automatically notice the commit and create a staging site to look at https://builds.apache.org/view/A-D/view/Creadur/ which is always up to date (within a couple of minutes of any commit).
Need to make changes? No problem - go back and repeat the cycle as often as you like.
Happy with changes and ready to go live? Then read on...
The publishing process updates the main site with any changes committed since the last time the site was published.
Publishing is a multi-stage process with a mixture of automated and manual processing. End to end, the process is slow - perhaps taking 30 minutes but close supervision is not required.
Rat declares a local directory (stage) for Maven site deployments. To avoid excessive numbers of commits, the local directory needs to remain ignored by subversion. As well as being the target for mvn site-deploy, this is also the origin for publication.
Triggering the automated publication pipeline is a two phase process: Maven needs to deploy the latest site locally and then scm-publish pushes this content into version control.
If you prefer to be prompted to type your subversion passphrase, edit ~/.scm/svn-settings.xml to include
<svn-settings> ... <useNonInteractive>false</useNonInteractive> <useAuthCache>false</useAuthCache> ... </svn-settings>
Run both steps together using
mvn site-deploy scm-publish:publish-scm
Publication is slow, and the plugin may wait silently for up to 30 minutes - so please allow the build enough time to complete.
The content committed by the Maven scm-publish plugin triggers a staging build on https://ci.apache.org/. To follow its progress, open the creadur site builder.
When this builds has completed successfully, review the content staged on https://creadur.staging.apache.org/rat/index.html. If this looks fine then publish the staged content using the ASF Content Management System.
Propagating the content to production may take a brief while (maybe 30 seconds) so please be patient a little longer.