Under the cover
The conversation is the front door. Behind it, familiar tools keep the source, prepare the files, and deliver the website to its visitors.
Make a change, publish again, and the same flow delivers the next version.
Your assistant helps turn intent into content, design, and website files. The plugin connects that work to publishing tools available to approved users.
The publisher needs a UCINetID on the allowlist. They don’t need to bring their own GitHub or AWS credentials; the flow provides authorized access for the operations it supports.
Each site has a private source repository: a home for its files and a record of committed changes. That gives ongoing work a durable starting point and makes earlier source versions recoverable.
The source repository is private; the website it produces is public. There is no public directory of sites here.
A change pushed to the site’s main branch starts its publishing workflow. The workflow installs dependencies, runs configured checks, and builds the website when a build is needed.
It then uploads the resulting static files to hosting. Build work runs separately from the deployment step, which obtains temporary AWS access through GitHub’s identity system.
A successful workflow reports that deployment completed. Checking the live pages is a separate part of reviewing the result.
S3 holds the HTML, styles, scripts, and images produced by the site. The storage bucket is private; visitors receive the public website through CloudFront.
CloudFront serves the files to visitors over HTTPS and caches content to help it load efficiently. The site’s address leads visitors to this delivery layer.
Sites normally use an address under pub.improbable.site. Administrator-coordinated domain configuration may allow another address, such as a subdomain of education.uci.edu, while retaining the source and publishing flow.
What “static” means here
A site can use plain HTML, a static-site generator, or React with a build tool, as long as the output is static files. Browser-side interaction is possible. A server or database needs a separate service.
This website uses Astro to generate four HTML pages with shared styling. It doesn’t need React or a running application server.
Discuss an integration with Rhett ↗