OpenTTD's website

This is the main website for OpenTTD, as can be seen on https://www.openttd.org/. main is always deployed on production. Pull Request can be reviewed on their preview URL.

This is a Jekyll website, and is served by nginx as a static site.

Development

Populating _downloads

By default _downloads is empty, so when building the website locally there is no latest stable/nightly. This can be resolved by running fetch_downloads. This script will download the latest available binaries, and populate _downloads.

python3 -m venv .env
.env/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.env/bin/python -m fetch_downloads

Running a local server

If you do not want to run a server, but just build the current site, replace serve with build in the examples below.

Under _site Jekyll will put the compiled result in both serve and build.

• Follow jekyll installation
• Run bundle install
• Run JEKYLL_ENV=production jekyll serve

FAQ

I want to make a new blog post

• Create a new file in _posts.
• Follow the existing format.
• Make a Pull Request. It will automatically be published on a preview website for you to see the result.
• Get it approved, squash/rebase it to main. main is automatically deployed to production.

I get an error about ua-parser.js while building

Please set JEKYLL_ENV to production. Without this, the symlink ua-parser.js is copied, instead of following it. With production it does the right thing. To recover, remove _site/static/js/ua-parser.js manually.

What is this download-descriptions.yml

On download pages, you notice that every binary has a human readable description. windows-win64.exe is for most people to cryptic. Windows 7 / 8 / 10 / 11 (64bit) (installer) is much more clear. This file takes care of that mapping, based on the postfix of the file.

Why the downloads?

Because this is a static website, but we do want to show in the header what the latest version is, we need to find a solution. We picked a solution where we fetch some files to know what the latest version is, and create a static version out of it. This means that every time the latest version changes, the website has to be recreated. As new versions are rare (once or sometimes twice a day at most), it is very cheaper to do it this way. It avoids any dynamic component in production.

Screenshots in a git repository?

Yes. By lack of better, we are doing this.