Deployment on other CI systems

[mortenpi]

Currently we officially only support deploying GitHub repositories on Travis CI to GitHub pages. deploydocs also relies on Travis-specific environment variables mostly. We should probably support more Git hosting and CI systems (documentation + generalized API where necessary). The following come to mind:

• GitLab: has its own CI and Pages
• BitBucket: has its own CI (Pipelines) and Pages

In the meantime, there are a few examples of how to work around current limitations:

• An example Documenter setup on BitBucket using BitBucket Pipelines and BitBucket Pages: https://bitbucket.org/mortenpi/documenterexample.jl/
• An example of Julia and Documenter on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/tkpapp/GitlabJuliaDemo.jl

[tkf]

FYI I added GitLabPages plugin to use Documenter.jl in GitLab repository created by PkgTemplates.jl: JuliaCI/PkgTemplates.jl#54

However, it only publishes dev document. It would be nice if Documenter.jl supports versioned documentation on GitLab pages.

[mortenpi]

How does GitLab handle tags? Can you run CI on tags?

[tkf]

Yes. It looks like you can detect it with CI_COMMIT_TAG https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/variables/README.html#predefined-environment-variables

I think a harder (?) issue is that GitLab pages is not a git branch as in GitHub. You create a directory public in your repository and the whole content is reflected to the GitLab pages (IIUC). It's actually convenient for publishing a single document (see how it's done in PkgTemplates: https://github.com/invenia/PkgTemplates.jl/blob/901a0a3d7139588819bad19acfc891a63bda7637/defaults/gitlab-ci.yml#L20) However, I think it's a bit more challenging to update a part of it (e.g., public/v1.2) since you need to store the whole content somewhere and retrieve it in the CI job. I guess you can create (say) gl-pages branch like gh-pages in GitHub and check it out at public. But I'm not familiar enough with the whole GitLab interface to know if there is a better way to do it.

[marekdedic]

I was just about to create a new issue suggesting adding support for Circle CI....

I think some of the environment variable checks could be done in the CI configuration - e. g. checking for pull requests isn't necessary if you only run the deploy job on the master branch...

[christopher-dG]

To add to this: GitHub Actions will be generally available soon and it would be nice be able to deploy to GitHub Pages from there.

[davidanthoff]

Just to second GitHub Actions! We have a nice set of actions in the works right now (https://github.com/julia-actions), and adding one for doc build and deploy would be great.

[sebastiangrimberg]

However, it only publishes dev document. It would be nice if Documenter.jl supports versioned documentation on GitLab pages.

Coming across this looking for a solution for versioned Documenter.jl output on Gitlab Pages. Does anyone have any update or idea if this is possible yet?

[mortenpi]

This issue is a little dated, so I'll go ahead an close it. We do now have some built-in support for other CI systems: https://juliadocs.github.io/Documenter.jl/stable/man/hosting/#Deployment-systems

I don't think the GitLab one supports pushing to GitLab Pages though.