Improve previews and auto-deploys on Vercel with more control on the build step about jupyterlite

[bollwyvl]

Anyhow: if you had some notes on the federated junk, I'm more than happy to start digging into docs/pipes/builds, since I wasn't making a lot of headway. Funny story: I demoed running robot framework inside polite today... Pretty insane.

[bollwyvl]

How about readthedocs? It's per-pr thing works great, works with conda so we can have our js and py (and maybe other languages in the future)... And we'd get docs! It can also be configured for multiple versions and languages, vs having to home roll something. Further, rtd is used by many languages and packages already, helping with #41... and if you're deploying a sandbox, it would look sharp for it to be attached to your docs, and get the same features.

[jtpio]

Ah good point!

And they have a nice GitHub integration with previews too. For example:

So yeah this might be the simplest actually.

[bollwyvl]

Cool, sounds good. If you set up the account, it's probably worth asking for the mamba feature flag immediately: https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/guides/feature-flags.html In the "deploying jupyterlite" section of the (eventual) actual docs, it is probably worth still mentioning vercel...

[jtpio]

If you set up the account, it's probably worth asking for the mamba feature flag immediately:

If I read this correctly, this must be requested by email?

A separate request can be made by contacting us via email to enable or disable one or more of these featured flags for a particular project.

[jtpio]

Just set up: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[bollwyvl]

Yeah it's an email. Weird.

[jtpio]

Got the confirmation the mamba flag has been enabled.

[bollwyvl]

Looks like the remaining things here:

• change references to previous vercel links to https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io
  • README.md
  • Github project URL: https://jupyterlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/_static/lab/index.html
  • set homepage, etc in various metadata spots

[jtpio]

set homepage, etc in various metadata spots

Do you think homepage should point to RTD? Or to the URL of the repo (like it seems to be for now)?

[bollwyvl]

One pro: if we get it hoisted to another, non-personal repo (even after release), at least the home URL would stay the same. It's less weird if the dev url changes, probably, because developers.

[jtpio]

One pro: if we get it hoisted to another, non-personal repo

Yes we should move it somewhere else at some point. Probably something for another issue though. I created the jupyterlite org on GitHub a while ago just in case. This could be a good place to have other lite stuff there too like other kernels, demo repos and more.

[bollwyvl]

I dig. No hurry. Good job on the demo.

I'm going to take a break and ship some other stuff. I feel like to be in a shippable state (whatever that means at this point) here, we need...

• a unified, deduplicated build of lab and classic to get the tarball size down
  • or two tarballs, with a check to disable the potentially confusing cross-app links
• /lab/extensions
• /files and derived /api/contents
• maybe the schema (documented)

...with at least a manual, documented way, not involving webpack, of getting stuff into a gh-pages/rtd-deployable state, given the janky CI artifact. then we can really start digging into stuff!

[bollwyvl]

I think with the secrets situation here, vercel deploys will make sense for certain kinds of projects, but we'd want to point out some of the shortcomings w/r/t python upstreams. I'll hoist the deduplication to a new issue.

[jtpio]

Maybe we can actually remove the Vercel deploy workflow from this repo.

The RTD setup has been working well so far, so we could just document the Vercel case in the docs.