GoW5DB - Gears 5 Database

A fan-made Jekyll site with a complete Gears 5 reference: characters, weapons, classes, marks, maps, gamemodes, the Fabricator, enemies, banners, bloodsprays, executions, expressions, esports, bundles, DLC, and Iron. Not affiliated with The Coalition or Xbox Game Studios.

Live site: https://gearsofwardatabases.github.io/GoW5DB/, built and deployed automatically to GitHub Pages on every push to main (see .github/workflows/deploy.yml). Many things are still to be finished and polished. E-Day is coming soon: see Gears of War Databases.

Made by: Xbox MissJamball#7618 / GitHub Ryan Turner (TheSCREWEDSoftware).

Running it locally

Requires Ruby (the deploy workflow uses 3.3, so that's the safest version to match locally) and Bundler.

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve

Then open http://localhost:4000. Jekyll watches the source files and rebuilds automatically on save - just refresh the browser.

On Windows, ref/start-jekyll.bat (in the reference submodule) does the same and also fills in the revision line in the header's top left corner (see Revision line).

Project structure

• _classes/ - one file per Horde/Escape class (see HOW-TO-ADD-A-CLASS.md for the full field reference and examples).
• _data/ - YAML data backing the site: card costs, perk costs, gamemodes, the Fabricator's prices, and more.
• _includes/ - shared partials (header, footer, description rendering, etc.) reused across layouts and pages.
• _layouts/ - page templates (default, class, section).
• _sass/ / styles/ - site styling (SCSS, compiled to compressed CSS via _config.yml's sass settings).
• images/ - all art assets, organized by section (weapons, cards, abilities, characters, classes/icons, perks, etc.) - each has its own README.md describing expected filenames.
• Everything else at the root (characters/, weapons/, classes/, marks/, maps/, gamemodes/, fabricator/, enemies/, banners/, bloodsprays/, executions/, expressions/, esports/, bundles/, dlc/, iron/, tools/) is one folder per site section, each with its own index.html that reads from _data/ and/or the classes collection.
• tools/ - interactive pages (Build Creator, Build Viewer, Class Randomizer, Weapon Randomizer, and the Map Creator in map-calibrator/) - vanilla JS, no build step of their own.
• guides/ - guides (coming soon).
• ref/ - the reference screenshots and the scripts that sort them, kept in their own repository, GoW5DB-Reference, included here as a git submodule. The site doesn't need it to build (it is excluded in _config.yml, and the deploy workflow doesn't fetch it). To get it: git clone --recurse-submodules this repository, or git submodule update --init in an existing clone. The Reference update workflow moves it to GoW5DB-Reference's newest commit every day at 04:00 UTC (or by hand: Actions > Reference update > Run workflow) and redeploys the site when it moved.

Adding content

• New class: see HOW-TO-ADD-A-CLASS.md - copy an existing _classes/*.md file and follow the field guide.
• Everything else (weapons, cards, gamemodes, marks, etc.): edit the relevant file under _data/, following the shape of existing entries in that same file.
• A section that isn't ready: coming_soon: true in its page's front matter greys it out in the menu and on the home page with a "Coming soon" tip.
• Site-wide texts (tagline, the work in progress note and its TODO link, the credits, the E-Day notice): _config.yml.

Revision line

The site shows which commit it was built from (hash, date, branch, OS):

• On GitHub Pages, centered in the footer: "Hosted on GitHub Pages." and the revision, the hash linking to the commit.
• In local and self-hosted builds, in the header's top left corner, with the server's uptime.

_plugins/last_commit.rb tells them apart by the GITHUB_ACTIONS variable that GitHub Actions sets.

Deployment

Push to main and the Deploy to GitHub Pages workflow builds the site with Jekyll and publishes it - no manual deploy step needed.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 Ryan Turner (TheSCREWEDSoftware) and the GoW5DB contributors.

The site's code (templates, styles, scripts, tools and data files written for it) is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See LICENSE.

Gears 5, its names, images and other game content belong to Microsoft and The Coalition. They are used here for reference in a non-commercial fan project and are not covered by this license.

Made with

Made with the help of Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant: written and reviewed together with it, then tested and published by Ryan Turner (TheSCREWEDSoftware).