Site Builds

Manual Builds

If you need to manually build the site for some reason, that has to be done from the admin console at http://netlify.com.

Automatic Builds

Differential Builds

We are employing Netlify's Gatsby caching mechanism to do differential builds, so only pages that are updated are rebuilt. That generally means a given build will only take a couple of minutes.

Builds Triggered by CMS Updates

Site builds for the live site are done automatically whenever things like blog posts, distributions, featured add-ons, and store items (which are managed using a web interface) are updated.

Netlify has a bot that monitors builds. If you request a number of builds back-to-back (like editing a bunch of blog posts quickly), the bot will hold all the changes until there haven't been any for a few minutes. Then it will build everything once. So if you did a bunch of edits and are wondering why the site hasn't rebuilt yet, that's probably why. Wait a few minutes, and the system should catch up.

Builds Triggered by Updates to the Repo

Any time new updates are pushed to the kodi-tv repo's main branch, that triggers a site build at Netlify.

Daily Updates of Add-on Pages

There is a scheduled GitHub action that grabs a current copy of the site code, runs a build, and then pushes updated files (the history.json for each Add-on repo the site tracks plus any new/updated add-on images) back to the kodi-tv repo's main branch. That then triggers a site build at Netlify. If there are no add-on updates, there will be no site update. That Github action is currently scheduled to run at 2am UTC. It can also be triggered manually from the Actions tab of the repo.

Editing the GitHub Action

The GitHub action is stored in the repo at .github/workflows/update-addon-history.yml. Here's the current action:

name: Update Add-on History

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  schedule:
    - cron:  '00 02 * * *'

jobs:
  add-on-update:
    name: Update Add-on History
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Cache gatsby paths
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        id: gatsbycache
        with:
          path: |
            .cache
            public
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-caches-${{ github.run_id }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-gatsby-caches

      - name: Cache npm node nodules
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        id: nodecache
        with:
          path: |
            ~/.npm
            node_modules
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('package.json') }}

      - name: Set Node Version
        uses: actions/setup-node@master
        with:
          node-version: 12.x

      - name: Install dependencies
        if: steps.nodecache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
        run: npm install

      - name: Build Gatsby site
        run: npm run build
        env:
          GATSBY_EXPERIMENTAL_PAGE_BUILD_ON_DATA_CHANGES: true

      - name: Push new files back
        uses: mikeal/publish-to-github-action@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          BRANCH_NAME: 'main'

The action loads the current main branch, loads any existing caches of node_modules/Gatsby, installs dependencies (only if the package.json for the site has changed), builds the Gatsby site, saves the udpated Gatsby cache, and then pushes the changed files to the main branch. The caching helps cut the run time down from about 8 minutes for the first run to about 4 minutes for all subsequent runs.