The CUNY Office of Library Services manages more than a dozen EZproxy servers on behalf of the CUNY Libraries. To help manage all the EZproxy web pages (which are identical except for the campus-specific information), we automated the creation and standardization of the HTML files. Using templates, we can now easily make universal changes with just a couple of keystrokes.
This project was built on MacOS. It uses the Rust programming language, the tera-cli command line tool for the tera template engine, and Bootstrap CSS framework.
If you are a contributing member of the CUNY Libraries organization, you can edit files directly in GitHub. When your commit is merged, view the Actions of the "Push Main" workflow. Click on the most recent workflow run and scroll down to "Artifacts." Download the output.zip file.
Make a pull request and edit the files. If your commits are merged into the main branch, you'll find the output file in the Actions of the "Push Main" workflow. Click on the most recent workflow run and scroll down to "Artifacts." From there, download the output.zip file.
Run the following command in your terminal:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
This uses the rustup installer to download and install the Rust programming language.
Run the following command in your terminal and follow the on-screen prompts:
cargo install --git https://github.com/chevdor/tera-cli --tag v0.3.0 --root .
The file and folder structure is not necessarily intuitive.
- configs: contains one
.tomlconfiguration file for each campus. - templates: contains the templates that are extended by the pages.
- pages: contains the actual pages that are to be served up by EZproxy.
- static: contains common files that will live in the
docs\publicfolder on EZproxy. - favicons: contains one
.icofavorite icon for each campus. - logos: contains one
.pnglogo file for each campus.
- README.md: that's this file!
- build.sh: shell script you must run in the command line to build the
.htm(and all other) files you will need for EZproxy.
Make changes to the files in the templates folder when you need to change the overarching appearance of the HTML pages.
Make changes to the files in the pages folder when you need to change the individual HTML pages.
Make changes to the files in the config folder when you need to update campus-specific information (e.g., URL for A-Z list).
Add/remove/update logos in the logos folder.
Add/remove/update favicons in the favicons folder.
Modify build.sh when you need to add/remove campus sites to the project.
After editing the files, you must build the pages that you will upload to the docs directory on the EZproxy server.
Run the following command in your terminal:
bash build.sh
This will create an output folder in the working directory, with a subfolder for each EZproxy site.
Upload the contents of the output folder to EZproxy's docs folder.
This would not be possible without @philipcristiano. Thank you!