lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages 0.2.2

Enable GitLab pages to provide documentation for multiple versions

Lightweight Versioned GitLab Pages

Generate index page with links to all previously archived folders during a tag build.

This repo developed in and mirrored from GitLab brainelectronics. Please raise your issues and submit your pull requests/merge requests there.

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Installation

pip install lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages

Documentation

📚 The latest documentation is available at

• Lightweight versioned GitLab Pages GitLab Pages
• Lightweight versioned GitLab Pages ReadTheDocs

Reasoning

GitLab offers the possibility to create or place a folder named public in the root of the repo. The contents of this folder are then displayed by GitLab pages and is accessible from outside the repo via a custom URL.

For this package, the URL is https://brainelectronics.gitlab.io/-/lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages. This is also the location of the (latest) documentation for this package. Since only only one "thing" can be displayed there, usually only the most recent content is available at this URL. This is where this package is supposed to help.

Usage

It is assumed that only tagged states of the documentation or other content will be displayed on the GitLab Pages web page, see also chapter Limitations.

The script will use an API token to make all requests through the python-gitlab package. This token must be specified via the --private-token argument. The token can be generated via Settings -> Access Tokens and requires api scope.

In addition, the unique project ID must be specified with --project-id. This ID can be found at the top of each repo. For this repository it is 43170198.

The last mandatory parameter is --job-name. This is the name of the job that generates, for example, the documentation or other content that will be displayed via the GitLab pages web page.

The generated index.html is placed in a folder named public. By default this folder is created in the same directory from which this script is called. A different destination folder can be specified with --output-dir. The folder does not have to exist, it and its possibly needed parent directories will be created if necessary.

If a self-hosted GitLab is used, the URL to the instance can be specified with --url to not restrict this package to GitLab.com only.

Help

generate-versioned-pages --help

Generate lightweight versioned pages

The following command will create a folder named public at the current location and place an index HTML file inside.

This index file contains a simple list of Bootstrap cards with all previously built tags and the URL to the public pages archive files.

generate-versioned-pages \
--private_token asdf-carlTheLamaIsHere \
--project-id 43170198 \
--job-name pages

Then use this generated folder in the pages job. The job configuration in the file .gitlab-ci.yml can look like the following example and is used in that way for this package.

pages:
  stage: deploy
  before_script:
    - pip install lightweight-versioned-gitlab-pages
  script:
    - generate-versioned-pages
      --private_token ${GITLAB_API_TOKEN}
      --project-id ${CI_PROJECT_ID}
      --job-name generate-docs
  artifacts:
    expire_in: never
    paths:
      - public
  only:
    - main

How it works

First, the available tags of the repo are requested/gathered by the get_project_tags function. For each tag, the corresponding pipeline job is requested based on the provided job-name argument. The job status must be successful to avoid erroneous or currently generated artifacts. For each job, the URL to the index file of the public folder is generated, see get_artifact_url The generated list of TagInfos will then be used to create a simple index.html file inside a generated public folder, unless it is to be generated elsewhere. The template is rendered with Jinja2.

Limitations

• Only links to tagged and archived data of public folders are included in the index
• Job artifacts must be publicly accessible
  • Make sure that CI/CD is activated and set to Everyone With Access at Settings -> General -> Visibility