hsmusic-wiki

HSMusic

HSMusic, short for the Homestuck Music Wiki, is a revitalization and reimagining of earlier projects archiving and celebrating the expansive history of Homestuck official and fan music. Roughly periodic releases of the website are released at hsmusic.wiki; all development occurs in a few different public Git repositories:

• hsmusic-wiki (GitHub, Notabug, cgit): all the code used to run hsmusic on your own computer, and the canonical reference for all of the wiki's software behavior
• hsmusic-data (GitHub, Notabug, cgit): all the data representing the contents of the wiki; collaborative additions and improvements to wiki content all end up here
• hsmusic-media (GitHub): media files referenced by content in the data repository; includes all album assets, commentary images, additional files, etc
• hsmusic-lang (GitHub): localization files for presenting the wiki's user interface in different languages

Quick Start

Install dependencies:

• Node.js - we recommend using nvm to install Node and keep easy track of any versions you've got installed; during development we generally test on 22.x LTS
• ImageMagick - check your package manager if it's available (e.g. apt or homebrew) or follow installation info right from the official website

Make a new empty folder for storing all your wiki repositories, then clone 'em with git:

$ cd /path/to/my/projects/
$ mkdir hsmusic
$ cd hsmusic
$ git clone https://github.com/hsmusic/hsmusic-wiki code
Cloning into 'code'...
$ git clone https://github.com/hsmusic/hsmusic-data data
Cloning into 'data'...
$ git clone https://github.com/hsmusic/hsmusic-media media
Cloning into 'media'...

Install NPM dependencies (packages) used by HSMusic:

$ cd code
$ npm install
added 413 packages, and audited 612 packages in 10s

Optionally, use npm link to make hsmusic available from the command line anywhere on your device:

$ npm link
# This doesn't work reliably on every device. If it shows
# an error about permissions (and you aren't interested in
# working out the details yourself), you can just move on.

Go back to the main directory (containing all the repos) and make a couple of empty folders that will be useful during builds:

$ cd ..

$ pwd
/path/to/my/projects/hsmusic
$ ls
code/  data/  media/
# If you don't see the above info, you've moved to the wrong directory.
# Just do cd /path/to/my/projects/hsmusic (with whatever path you created
# the main directory in) to get back.

$ mkdir cache
$ mkdir out

Anytime a command shows hsmusic in the following examples, if your npm link command didn't work or you get a "command not found" error, you can just replace hsmusic with node code.

The wiki uses thumbnails, but these aren't included in the media repository you downloaded. The wiki will automatically generate new thumbnails as you add them to the media repository (as part of each build), but the first time, you should just generate the thumbnails.

$ hsmusic --data-path data --media-path media --cache-path cache --thumbs-only

Provided you've got ImageMagick installed, this should go more or less error-free, although it may take a while (for the Homestuck Music Wiki, typically 40-80 minutes). It may fail to generate a few thumbnails, and will show an error message, if so. Just run the command again, and they should work the second time around.

Then build the site. There are two methods for this. If you're publishing to the web (or just want a complete, static build of the site for your own purposes), use --static-build, as below:

$ hsmusic --static-build --data-path data --media-path media --cache-path cache --out-path out

The site's contents will generate in the specified out folder. For the Homestuck Music Wiki, this generally takes around 40-60 minutes. You can upload these to a web server if you'd like to publish the site online. Or run your HTTP server of choice (npx http-server -p 8002, python3 -m http.server 8002) to view the build locally.

If you're testing out your changes (for example, before filing a pull request), use --live-dev-server, as below:

$ hsmusic --live-dev-server --data-path data --media-path media --cache-path cache

Once initial loading is complete (usually 8-16 seconds), the site will generate pages as you open them in your web browser. Open http://localhost:8002/ when hsmusic instructs you to. You have to restart the server to refresh its data and see any data changes you've saved; hold control and press C (^C) to cancel the build, then run the command again to restart the server.

Help! It's not working

If you encounter any errors along the way, or would like help getting the wiki working, please feel welcomed to reach out through the HSMusic Community Discord Server. We're a fairly active group there and are always happy to help! This also applies if you don't have much experience with Git, GitHub, Node, or any of the necessary tooling, and want help getting used to them.

Building without writing --data-path (etc) every time

(These specific instructions apply only for bash and zsh. If you're using another shell, e.g. on Windows, you can probably adapt the principles, but we don't have a ready-to-go script, yet. Sorry!)

It can be mildly inconvenient to write (or remember to write, or copy-paste) the --data-path data option, and similar options, every time. hsmusic will also detect and use environment variables for these; if you specify them this way, you don't need to provide the corresponding command line options.

Suppose you've locally organized your wiki repositories as below:

path/to/my/projects/
  hsmusic/
    cache/  <empty directory, or cached generated files>
    code/   <clone of hsmusic-wiki>
    data/   <clone of hsmusic-data>
    media/  <clone of hsmusic-media>
    out/    <empty directory, or a static build>

Create an env.sh file inside the top-level hsmusic folder, containing data, media, etc. If your shell is bash, enter these contents:

#!/bin/bash
base="$(realpath "$(dirname ${BASH_SOURCE[0]})")"
export HSMUSIC_CACHE="$base/cache/"
export HSMUSIC_DATA="$base/data/"
export HSMUSIC_MEDIA="$base/media/"
export HSMUSIC_OUT="$base/out/"

If your shell is zsh, enter these contents:

#!/usr/bin/env zsh
base=${0:a:h}
export HSMUSIC_CACHE="$base/cache/"
export HSMUSIC_DATA="$base/data/"
export HSMUSIC_MEDIA="$base/media/"
export HSMUSIC_OUT="$base/out/"

Then use source env.sh when starting work from the CLI to get access to all the convenient environment variables.

Notes for developers

Which platform features are OK for hsmusic-wiki!?

Here's how to decide when new programming language features are ready for use in hsmusic-wiki:

• Build-code JS (anything not in the browser): Whatever is supported in the latest LTS release of node.js. We hung out on 20.x for a needlessly long time; now we're calling that we can update to the latest LTS at any point.

• Client JS: This one's mucky, but target stuff available across latest browsers since three years ago (to the month). It's generally possible for individual client modules to fail and even for graceful fallbacks where we notice, so it's not the end of the world for stuff to slip through a little early.

• Client HTML and CSS: Firmer focus on only using what was available across browsers three years ago (to the month). Utterly ornamental CSS can use newer features, but only if it's flat-out necessary and does not impact the usability of the site at all (i.e. if the CSS fails then it's just as though that ornament weren't added).

We haven't noted whether caniuse and MDN are based on different data sets or not, but out of convenience, we usually use MDN now that it shows this "Baseline" box for a lot of features, with month-year compat info up front. We're aware that these resources are never perfect, so pay closer attention before committing to huge new JS APIs, etc.