Issue with generating the website with sphinx

Solution 1:

In the case of managing sphinx using pip (requirements.txt), pipenv, or poetry, we can deploy our documentation to GitHub Pages as follows. For also other Python-based Static Site Generators like pelican and MkDocs, the workflow works as same. Here is a simple example of MkDocs. We just add the workflow as .github/workflows/gh-pages.yml

For more options, see the latest README: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages: GitHub Actions for GitHub Pages 🚀 Deploy static files and publish your site easily. Static-Site-Generators-friendly.

name: github pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Setup Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        with:
          python-version: '3.8'

      - name: Upgrade pip
        run: |
          # install pip=>20.1 to use "pip cache dir"
          python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip

      - name: Get pip cache dir
        id: pip-cache
        run: echo "::set-output name=dir::$(pip cache dir)"

      - name: Cache dependencies
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
          path: ${{ steps.pip-cache.outputs.dir }}
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-pip-${{ hashFiles('**/requirements.txt') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-pip-

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: python3 -m pip install -r ./requirements.txt

      - run: mkdocs build

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./site

Solution 2:

I got it to work, but there is no dedicated action to build and host sphinx docs on either github pages or readthedocs as of yet, so as far as I am concerned there is quite a bit left to be desired here.

This is my current release_sphinx job that uses the deploy-action-for-github-pages action and uploads to github-pages:

release_sphinx:
  needs: [build]
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  container:
    image: python:3.6
    volumes:
      - dist:dist
      - public:public
  steps:

    # check out sources that will be used for autodocs, plus readme
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1

    # download wheel that was build and uploaded in the build step
    - uses: actions/download-artifact@v1
      with:
        name: distributions
        path: dist

    # didn't need to change anything here, but had to add sphinx.ext.githubpages
    # to my conf.py extensions list. that fixes the broken uploads
    - name: Building documentation
      run: |
        pip install dist/*.whl
        pip install sphinx Pallets-Sphinx-Themes
        sphinx-apidoc --no-toc --module-first -o docs/autodoc src/stenotype
        sphinx-build docs public -b dirhtml

    # still need to build and set the PAT to get a rebuild on the pages job,
    # apart from that quite clean and nice 
    - name: github pages deploy
      uses: peaceiris/[email protected]
      env:
        PERSONAL_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PAT }}
        PUBLISH_BRANCH: gh-pages
        PUBLISH_DIR: public

    # since gh-pages has a history, this step might no longer be necessary.
    - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
      with:
        name: documentation
        path: public

Shoutout to the deploy action's maintainer, who resolved the upload problem within 8 minutes of me posting it as an issue.