Deployment#

Documentation on Github Pages#

The procedure below describes the steps to follow in order to publish documentation pages from a new repository in the Scipp organisation to the scipp.github.io website.

In this example, we assume that the new repository is named ess (the full path including organisation is hence scipp/ess).

All documentation must go in a docs folder located at the root of the repository. We use sphinx (and nbsphinx) to transform .rst files and Jupyter notebooks into html pages.

  1. Clone the ess repository: git clone git@github.com:scipp/ess.git

  2. Create a gh-pages branch on the repository with git checkout -b gh-pages

  3. On Github, go to the repository Settings > Pages (you will need admin rights to see the Settings tab). You should see that it is now saying “Your site is published at https://scipp.github.io/ess/”. It should also be saying it is using the gh-pages branch and the /root folder.

  4. On your local machine, generate a ssh key, without an email or passphrase: ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096. When prompted for a file name, use gh_pages_deploy_key.

  5. Go to the repository’s Settings > Deploy keys. Add a new key, and copy the contents of the gh_pages_deploy_key.pub file. Remember to also give the key write access to the repository.

  6. Go to the project page on Azure. Go to Pipelines > Library. Open the Variable Group named tokens if it already exists, if not create one.

  7. Copy/paste the contents of the gh_pages_deploy_key.pub file into a new secret variable named gh_pages_deploy_key_public.

  8. Still in the Azure project’s library, go to Pipelines > Library > Secure Files. Upload the gh_pages_deploy_key (the private key of the pair without the .pub) file as a secure file.

  9. On your local machine, to back to where you cloned the ess git repository. Create a new branch starting from the main branch: git checkout main then git checkout -b deploy_docs.

  10. In that new branch, enable docs deployment in the .azure-pipelines/main.yml and .azure-pipelines/release.yml files, by simply setting deploy: true.

  11. Push the changes to github (git push origin deploy_docs) and create a pull request. Hopefully, once the pull request is merged into main the pages will show up on https://scipp.github.io/ess.

Note

An alternative to this last step is, instead of waiting for the PR to be merged, one can just change the “branches trigger” in the main.yml and at the same time disable publishing of new packages as a temporary change.