I’ve been looking into a way of publishing Discourse posts as Jekyll entries. I run a gaming community that uses a Discourse forum. In it, there are pages (rules, tutorials etc.) that I’d like to feel more permanent, more easily accessible. I got around this by curating permalinks, but then there are nice-to-haves like mission debriefs - or even a monthly blog that could keep non-members engaged. This is where we run into the forum’s limitations as a platform.
Enter Github-powered Jekyll. Easy and fun to set up, uses the same markup language as the forum, and every change is publicly visible - which helps build and maintain trust. Creating a pull request, however, is a problem for almost all of our members, who are non-technical.
Ideally, I’d like to keep a familiar interface and make the process automagical. Another issue is authentication and access control: authentication is implicitly taken care of, and access control is certainly achievable via the Groups feature.
The Solution - Design
Every time a post tagged, eg, featured is updated, a commit must be made to the blog’s repository. This can be handled in a Discourse
plugin but I’m too lazy to learn Ruby, and we’re still in the prototyping phase.
Enter Google’s Cloud Functions, webhook-triggered NodeJS code that runs as soon as you upload the code. Couple that with Discourse webhooks and we have our recipe for disaster!
Webhook is a way to notify external services about changes on the internet. It’s easier to setup, manage and develop than a Discourse plugin. Though, it does require you to program a little bit or understand its technical details.
Here’s the plan:
- Discourse fires a webhook following a user action
- Google Functions picks it up, evaluates, and makes a commit
- New commit fires the build cycle in Github Pages
Implementation
And there we are. I’ll be updating this after the summer - vacations coming up!