Bridgetown Website README

Welcome to your new Bridgetown website! You can update this README file to provide additional context and setup information for yourself or other contributors.

Table of Contents

• Bridgetown Website README
  • Table of Contents
  • Prerequisites
  • Install
  • Development
    • Commands
  • Deployment
  • Contributing

Prerequisites

• Ruby
  • >= 3.3
• Bridgetown gem
  • gem install bridgetown -N
• Node
  • >= 22

Install

cd bridgetown-site-folder
bundle install && npm install

Learn more: Bridgetown Getting Started Documentation.

Development

To start your site in development mode, run bin/bridgetown start and navigate to localhost:4000!

Check out plugins if you're looking to add functionality or a theme to your site.

Commands

# running locally
bin/bridgetown start

# build & deploy to production
bin/bridgetown deploy

# load the site up within a Ruby console (IRB)
bin/bridgetown console

Learn more: Bridgetown CLI Documentation

Managing Events & Social Media

We use a custom CLI script (bin/event) to manage meetup posts and automatically publish them to our social media channels (Mastodon and Bluesky).

1. Create a new event

bin/event new 2026-08-20 "Intro to Hotwire"

This generates a new markdown post in src/_posts/ with the correct boilerplate front matter. You can then edit the file to add details like the meetup_link.

2. Publish and announce on social media

bin/event publish

This launches an interactive wizard that lets you:

• Select an event from a reverse-chronological list of all posts.
• Choose a post template (Original Announcement, Reminder, or Post-Event Recap).
• Edit the social media post text inline.
• Automatically publish the post to Mastodon and Bluesky using credentials stored in 1Password.

Threaded Replies: The first time you publish an event, bin/event publish will save the generated Mastodon and Bluesky URLs directly into the post's markdown front matter. If you run bin/event publish again for the same event (e.g. to send a Reminder or Post-Event recap), it will automatically fetch those URLs and post your new updates as threaded replies to the original post on both platforms!

Troubleshooting Social Publishing

• "Failed to retrieve Mastodon/Bluesky token from 1Password": This usually means your terminal session's 1Password CLI authentication has timed out or is pointed at the wrong account. Run op signin in your terminal to unlock the CLI, and try again!

Deployment

You can deploy Bridgetown sites on hosts like statichost.eu and Render as well as traditional web servers by simply building and copying the output folder to your HTML root.

Read the Bridgetown Deployment Documentation for more information.

Contributing

If repo is on GitHub:

1. Fork it
2. Clone the fork using git clone to your local development machine.
3. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
4. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
5. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
6. Create a new Pull Request