Is there a way to build for local testing vs production deployment?

[Jefficus]

Currently, if I want to do some local work (tweaking the theme, experimenting with a plugin, etc.) I have to change a bunch of conf.py settings and then remember to change them back before the next deploy. I was hoping to find a way to override specific settings with environment vars or at least be able to point to a different conf.py on the command line, but I'm not finding anything like that.

How are other people managing their developer vs production contexts?

[Kwpolska]

I would recommend keeping your site in a Git repository. That way, you can easily experiment and then revert the commit or undo uncommitted changes.

[Jefficus]

I do have my site in a git repo. (I'm hosting it on GitHub, so it's pretty much required. :-)

It just seems like huge overkill to branch the repo and modify the conf.py, just to change a few color settings. I'd like to be able to make the changes, build locally, and look at it in the browser on my local machine a few times without all the overhead. If I don't like the changes, I could just checkout-stomp the local files, and if I do like them, I could commit and deploy. Easy peasy.

To do that, we would need to be able to do something like: SITE_URL=localhost:8000 nikola build and check our work before pushing it out into the world. (And I would argue that this kind of workflow would be much easier to explain to newbies than how to work with git branch.)

[Kwpolska]

You can already do that? As long as your output folder is not the folder you’re serving from (and our docs don’t ever suggest this route), you can run nikola build and nikola serve (or nikola auto) and just see things locally. And then you can do a git restore and nikola build again before you deploy.

[Jefficus]

Yes, that's the way I was doing it at first, but it turns out that doesn't work for things like RSS index pages, because they embed absolute URLs based on the SITE_URL setting. So that led me down the path of trying to have local and production versions of the conf.py. (Which I can now do, thanks to the --conf option that @felixfontein pointed out.)

Thanks for taking the time to help me muddle through it.

[felixfontein]

You could have two config files, one for testing and one for production, and select the one to use with the --conf= parameter.

[Jefficus]

OMG! That's exactly what I've been looking for, but I haven't seen that option documented anywhere! Thank you.

Out of curiosity did I miss that param in the documentation somewhere? nikola build --help and man nikola don't seem to mention it.

[felixfontein]

It is mentioned in the handbook: https://getnikola.com/handbook.html#configuration

BTW, in the config file you probably want to set CACHE_FOLDER and DOIT_CONFIG.dep_file to something different (for at least one of the two configs), like this:

CACHE_FOLDER = 'cache-testing'

DOIT_CONFIG = {
    'dep_file': '.doit-testing.db'
}

[Jefficus]

D'oh! I've been using the handbook extensively but I assumed `nikola --help` was complete so never thought to look in the book for more options. My bad. And now that I read up on it, I see that we can use minimal alternate configs that only override specific variables from our normal conf, which completely solves my hope to do that with environment variables. I love it when I discover that a new tool is even more robust than I thought. Thanks again.