Enable AOT cache in build-generator and use it in deploy workflow

- build-generator.yml: generate AOT cache after building fat JAR and commit it
- deploy.yml: use AOT cache when running the generator for faster startup
- .gitignore: allow generate.aot to be committed

Co-authored-by: Copilot <223556219+Copilot@users.noreply.github.com>

Author: brunoborges

.github/workflows/build-generator.yml

@@ -26,15 +26,18 @@ jobs:
       - name: Build fat JAR
         run: jbang export fatjar --force --output html-generators/generate.jar html-generators/generate.java
 
-      - name: Commit updated JAR
+      - name: Build AOT cache
+        run: java -XX:AOTCacheOutput=html-generators/generate.aot -jar html-generators/generate.jar
+
+      - name: Commit updated JAR and AOT cache
         run: |
           git config user.name "github-actions[bot]"
           git config user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com"
-          git add html-generators/generate.jar
+          git add html-generators/generate.jar html-generators/generate.aot
           if git diff --cached --quiet; then
-            echo "No changes to generate.jar"
+            echo "No changes to generate.jar or generate.aot"
           else
-            git commit -m "Rebuild generate.jar from generate.java
+            git commit -m "Rebuild generate.jar and generate.aot from generate.java
 
           Auto-generated by build-generator workflow.
 

.github/workflows/deploy.yml

@@ -7,6 +7,7 @@ on:
       - 'content/**/*.json'
       - 'templates/**'
       - 'html-generators/generate.jar'
+      - 'html-generators/generate.aot'
       - 'site/**'
   workflow_dispatch:
 
@@ -31,7 +32,7 @@ jobs:
           java-version: '25'
 
       - name: Generate HTML pages and snippets.json
-        run: java -jar html-generators/generate.jar
+        run: java -XX:AOTCache=html-generators/generate.aot -jar html-generators/generate.jar
 
       - name: Setup Pages
         uses: actions/configure-pages@v5

.gitignore

@@ -16,7 +16,6 @@ site/data/snippets.json
 # Generated index page (built from templates/index.html by html-generators/)
 site/index.html
 
-# Platform-specific CDS/AOT cache (generated by build-cds.sh)
-html-generators/generate.aot
+# Platform-specific CDS/AOT intermediate files (generated by build-cds.sh)
 html-generators/generate.jsa
 html-generators/generate.classlist