Manual Documentation Preview Action

[ssolson]

Once merged into main this will allow us to manually trigger a preview build of any docs PR to check that link ect are working correctly:

The preview will be available at:
https://mhkit-software.github.io/MHKiT/pr-previews/<PR#>/

Once merged into main to trigger the preview:

1. Click Actions
2. Click on "Manual Deploy PR Preview"
3. Click run workflow
4. Fill out the info
   

[ssolson]

@akeeste hoping to merge this to test #82 allowing us to preview the live version.

I have already tested this on my fork and the example links in #82 are working.

[akeeste]

Thanks @ssolson. Is there a way to automatically purge the PR-previews once the relevant PR is merged or closed? Maybe

• another action that triggers when a PR is merged or closed, looks for a related preview and merges it
• an extra step on the docs build for commits to main that removes previews (though this could close previews in progress)
• or we could just manually commit to gh-pages once in awhile, removing the previews directory

[ssolson]

@akeeste what previews directory are you talking about? Or I am not sure what your purge concern is here.

Previews are at:
https://mhkit-software.github.io/MHKiT/pr-previews/<PR#>/

Actual docs are on gh-pages branch viewable at:
https://mhkit-software.github.io/MHKiT/

[ssolson]

Never mind I see your point now. Let me address that by adding a removal action.

[akeeste]

Thanks @ssolson , looks good to merge

[ssolson]

@akeeste I tried once more to make the preview builds auto trigger on a PR but there are security issues with allowing an outside contributor to trigger deployments so I went back to the manual deploy.

[akeeste]

@akeeste I tried once more to make the preview builds auto trigger on a PR but there are security issues with allowing an outside contributor to trigger deployments so I went back to the manual deploy.

That makes sense. An automatic preview opens up the possibility for anything to appear on our documentation. The manually deployed preview will still be very helpful and seems pretty easy to trigger once implemented