I have a client for whom I am creating a Jekyll product documentation site. The scope of the content is not huge, i.e. tens of documents rather than hundreds or thousands.
Some of their customers are required to run the product on stand-alone servers i.e. not connected to the Internet. So they’ve asked me if they could bundle and send their documentation site (when it’s finished) via USB drive or other media. Ideally it would just run off that media without requiring installation of software on their local computers. I don’t know if this is feasible, or if it is something that anyone does. There are some pretty smart software engineers in the company (although I’m not one of them!) who could definitely do it, if it’s do-able. I am just running it by the community here in case anyone has tried it, or if there is some reason why it could/could not be done.
if you do the urls to images and things correctly you should be able to browse the site without a server.
The server helps figure out paths - if you make a totally flat structure where the html files, images and css are all on the same level I think it can work.
This isn’t a jekyll thing, just a browser/server/file system thing. There was a topic on here recently that covered some of it.
Thanks. Thought it might have been something like that. The engineers at this company shouldn’t have any trouble working that out, then. All I need to is to write the procedure once they’ve finessed it.
Before you release the site onto the USB drive. You can take the site for a “test-drive” yourselves.
Simply open _site/index.html in your browser.
Disclaimer:
Technically, any static site ought to be “surfable” without a server.
But Jekyll typically fashions internal urls to be run on a server.
So, surfing your site with the file:// protocol may not render the pages on your browser as expected.
Right! So it might not actually be so straightforward. What I had in mind is using one of the kinds of lightweight servers that (for instance) ADSL modems use to serve up their user pages.
Anyway - the engineers at the client company might have some ideas on that, so I’ll put it to them.