Vidius

Vidius is a markdown editor tailored for editing static Jekyll websites.

It supports generating live site previews.

Using Vidius to edit alpha.nhs.uk

If you're a content editor and you just want to use it:

• Go to https://vidius.herokuapp.com
• Log in with GitHub. You will need to grant access for "NHS.UK Vidius" to access your repositories.

Tech overview

The application comprises:

• a lightweight backend written in Sinatra
• a frontend written in React
• a worker (background) process for generating previews, using Resque and Redis to communicate between them.

An instance of Vidius is configured to point at a single GitHub repository containing a Jekyll site.

Previews are generated in the background by downloading the repository, building it, uploading to a new S3 bucket and passing the URL to the app.

Use Vidius in local development mode

Install dependencies

You will need to install:

• Redis (server)
• Ruby version specified in .ruby-version - see rbenv
• Ruby dependencies (bundle install)

Set up your environment

We've configured two GitHub applications (production and development) in order to use GitHub's OAuth login system. The development application redirects to http://localhost:9292/… rather than https://vidius.herokuapp.com/…

You need to fetch the client id and secret of the development application which you can find at https://github.com/organizations/nhsalpha/settings/applications/285239

All the environment variables you need are described in environment.sh.example Copy to environment.sh, edit it and source with . environment.sh.

Run the web and worker processes

See Procfile for command lines for running the web and worker processes.