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License

License

DevHub TechDocs Publish

This repository contains the code and related artifacts for a Docker container GitHub action that can be used in a GitHub Action workflow to build and publish TechDocs-compatible documentation to DevHub. In addition, the Docker image can be used by developers in their own environments to build and preview content.

Technical Details

The action defined in this repository is a Docker container action that bundles up the Backstage techdocs-cli tool along with its npm and python dependencies, some plugins/extensions used by the DevHub and some custom logic implemented in bash.

Please take a look at the documentation for instructions on how to make use of the Action or the Docker image.

Project Status

  • Stable Beta

Development

This section provides notes for developers working on maintaining or improving devhub-techdocs-publish.

Using branches

Users of devhub-techdocs-publish are directed to use the stable version of the Action, which resolves to the contents of the stable branch of this repo. Given this, we want to keep stable, uh, stable, so will not want to use stable as our working branch. Instead, we will normally work in main and use a PR workflow to incorporate changes into stable when we want to make changes available to our users.

Building

With GitHub Actions

The logic of devhub-techdocs-publish Action is implemented as a Docker image. The Docker image is automatically built on every push to main using the docker_build.yml workflow file. Once a build succeeds, the resulting image will be available in the repo's packages list.

Locally

The image can also be built locally using the following command, or equivalent if you are not using docker. (In this case, we are tagging the image with devhub-publisher to make it easier to identify.

podman build --tag=devhub-publisher .

Testing

To test that the image is working as expected, you can run the locally-built image (see local build) using the instructions below.

Note: these instructions only user the build and preview functionality of the image. The publishing functions require additional credentials. Contact the developers on the Developer Experience team for guidance on testing publishing locally.

podman run -it -p 3000:3000 -v $(pwd):/github/workspace devhub-publisher preview

If successful, you will be able to open a browser to http://localhost:3000 to see the TechDocs for this repository rendered in a DevHub-like format.

Tagging and publishing

Once you have changes that you're happy with in main and would like to make them available in the stable version, you'll need to take the following steps:

  • test your changes locally
  • push your changes to the main branch of the repo in GitHub and
  • check that an image was built successfully with the GitHub Action that has your changes
  • find the current highest version tag using git tag.
  • run ./tag.sh <new tag>, where <new tag> is the current highest tag incremented by 1. For example, if the current version is v0.0.20, <new tag> would be v0.0.21.

Running the tag.sh command will:

  • update the action.yml file to point to a Docker image in GitHub packages tagged with <new tag>
  • commit the updated action.yml file locally
  • create a new git tag with the value of <new tag>
  • push the local commit and the new tag to GitHub

Once this completes, a new image will be built by the GitHub Action, tagged with the value of <new tag>.

So, the last part of the publishing a new version of the Action is to make a pull request from the main branch into the stable so users of the stable version will be using the new image you just created. This feels kind of "backwards" to be merging from main but that's what you want to in this situation. Once the PR is merged, users making use of the stable version of the Action from their workflow files will get the latest changes you've just made.

Rolling back stable

If for some reason, you need to revert stable to a prior version of an image, this can be done by editing the image tag referenced in action.yml in the stable branch to point to a prior version. (this can be done directly vs. a PR). Keep in mind, that if the action.yml or other files in the repo aren't compatible with the image version you're now pointing to (e.g. Action input parameters or mkdocs plugins have changed), this may not work on its own and other edits may be needed. In this case, it may be best to have git help with the rollback. (git revert, for e.g.)

License

Copyright 2024 Province of British Columbia

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.