4.14 Separating sources

Sources described in this section and next ones can be found under directory site-04 in the examples archive downloadable from http://www.g-cows.org.

Until now, source and output files have been kept in the same directory. I usually prefer keeping them separated so releasing the site is easier.

First, let's clean the directory tree to remove the generated files:

$ make clean

Now, we run Cows-mkgen with the -prefix option:

$ cows-mkgen --prefix="../www"

This command tell Cows-mkgen to create the Makefile so that output file will be placed inside directory ../www. In other words, output files won't be created inside site-04, but in a sister directory called www/.

$ make
cows --parents --root-dir ../www/   index.cws ../www/index.html

... rest of output skipped

As you can see, Make launched Cows with the -root-dir option, and the -parents one. The latter is needed since we can't be sure the directory ../www already exists.

Later in the tutorial we'll see that the same result can be achieved creating a file called Makefile.cm.

Of course, our site will miss files non processed by Cows, like images and stylesheets. So, let's create symbolic links for them:

$ cd ../www
$ ln -s ../site-04/images
$ ln -s ../site-04/css

Now, you can keep source files, style sheets, images inside site-04/ and see them from ../www too.

Imoprtant: when you update your site make sure to update the content of directories pointed by the symbolic links, not the symbolic links themselves. Most ftp clients should work as expected by default.