Automated documentation previews in pull requests

[weiji14]

Description of the desired feature

Make it easier to preview changes to the documentation online in every pull request, rather than having to clone the branch and do a local build. I.e. Continuous Documentation.

Will be especially helpful for new contributors and even reviewers wanting a quick look at what's going up on the website. This was hinted at during #314.

I'm gonna try to set up an automated Continuous Deployment site, just a heads up!

Are you willing to help implement and maintain this feature? Yes

[seisman]

@weiji14 I received your request to install a github app to the pygmt repository, but I can't find any description about the app. Is it related to this issue? Could you post the homepage of this app?

[weiji14]

Here it is https://zeit.co/.

[weiji14]

I'll try to get it to work on my own fork first. Need to find a way to make it do cd doc && make all

[seisman]

I’ve approved and installed the app.

[weiji14]

Cool, this might take a bit of time (and experimentation) to set up, but hope it'll be worth it!

[weiji14]

Hmm, I might have messed up the github app integration. Sorry @seisman, could you uninstall it first, and I'll try to request it to be reinstalled again?

[seisman]

@weiji14 I've uninstalled it.

[seisman]

@weiji14 I've approved the app and send you an email with a Now link, which may be necessary for installation.

[weiji14]

Ah cool, I think I've got it up now. I've also emailed you an invite link to join the 'gmt' organization on Now. There's shouldn't be much to configure though, getting the Github App Integration set up should be all we need.

If you can review #343, I'll get that merged and close this issue in #344.

[leouieda]

Thanks, Wei! I experimented with this in the past but it was hard to do with the CIs because forks don’t have access to encrypted variables needed for deploying. Does this app offer a way around that?

[weiji14]

The Zeit Now for Github App integration does a deploy every time a git push is made to the repo (be it in a Pull Request or master), and I think it has certain permissions to allow it to do that. For example at #344, there's a url for every commit, and also one for the PR/fork that keeps itself updated every commit, and is referenced to the fork's name (e.g. https://pygmt-git-fork-weiji14-continuous-docs.gmt.now.sh).

I did experiment with making deployments via Github Actions CI (which I've attempted in my personal fork at weiji14#45) but that required setting a 'secrets' token variable. We can use a token as well to deploy to Zeit Now, but it's not strictly required with the app.